


No Strings Attached

by JessenoSabaku



Series: Public Displays of Affection Verse [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Asphyxiation, Choking, Dildos, Dirty Talk, Dream Sex, Dubiously consensual voyeurism, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Porn, F/F, F/M, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Femdom, Friends With Benefits, Frottage, Intercrural Sex, Masturbation, Polyamory, Polydins, Riding, Robot Sex, Romantic Friendship, Rough Sex, Situational Humiliation, Slow Burn, Team Bonding, Vaginal Fingering, Verbal Humiliation, Vibrators, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 12:19:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18916849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessenoSabaku/pseuds/JessenoSabaku
Summary: Pidge hated not knowing. Where Matt and her father were. If they were even alive. She hated not knowing if she would be strong enough to pay back what they suffered. Or brave enough. Similarly, she really came to fucking hate not knowing what the hell was going on with Keith, Hunk, and Lance.In which Pidge must help Keith bridge some rifts between himself and the other paladins.





	1. Lights Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reinkist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reinkist/gifts).



> This is part of the same universe as my other fic, "Public Displays of Affection," so if you haven't given that a read, some stuff might confuse you. If you'd like to read, you can view the fic here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10767930
> 
> Originally started this fic last year as a birthday present to my partner, reinkist. When their birthday passed and the project was still unfinished, then I decided I would finish it for Christmas. Then Christmas came and went, and I set my sights on Valentine's day. Then that date passed, and I finally finished the project a couple of days after our anniversary. So, happy Valbirthmasversary, reinkist.
> 
> I know that some people are sensitive about the canon ages of the Voltron characters, to the point that even aged-up versions are unacceptable. Which makes sense, because you shouldn't be allowed to, say, age-up a thirteen year old kid and have free reign to sexualize them while still fetishizing their innocent and child-like qualities. For me, the canon characters and my development of them in my head are more separate than that. I use their base personalities as a foundation and then build on them as if they were older, with characteristics/traits that older people have. The paladins here are envisioned as if they were in their early twenties. If that squicks you, please don't read.
> 
> Also, this takes place in the earlier, first couple of seasons.

Lights out on the Castleship was never the end of the day for Pidge. After everyone said farewell and tromped off to their respective rooms, she’d shuck off her pants, jump into bed with a concussive flop, and pull out her computer and her PDA thing and start up some holoscreens. Within seconds after everyone else’s trousers had dropped and their heads hit their pillows, Pidge’s displays were all filled with readings on the Castleship’s vitals, breathed out in zeroes and ones.

The ship didn’t sleep, so neither did she. Nights in space had always been hard for her to get used to: no sun and no moon, so the paladins had to construct their own circadian rhythm. And when every unproductive second spent free-floating in the cosmos felt like an extra mile away from her brother and father, well, wasting too much time on sleep felt pointless. Not that she could really _do_ anything useful just by staying up a few more hours, other than obsessively think and run mental calculations. But at least that was something. It was better than lying still, staring at the wall, and waiting. Just … waiting.

She tapped in an access code with one hand, idly scratching herself with the other. Temperature readings sprung up on one holoscreen and she quickly skimmed over them. Everything seemed optimal. The healing pods in the medical bay appeared as a nice chilly blue, the engines and thrusters were humming with friendly warm yellows and oranges, and the food goo dispenser in the kitchen was looking a little hot, but not yet at the level of malfunction. She opened a report file and typed in a few notes for Coran.

Punching in another code brought up more data feeds on her other holoscreens. She checked ventilation, lighting systems, power grids, everything she could find for running remote diagnostics. She picked at the hem of her undershorts and stifled a yawn. Once she had checked everything, she ran through all the readings again with a dim sense of apprehension in her stomach. Only an hour. All that only filled an hour.

The third time she ran through diagnostics, accruing more fragmentary notes for Coran along the way, she found something out of place. She sat there, finger hovering over the first holoscreen, staring at an overlay of the training bay. The training system was activated. Not only that, according to what the Castleship’s mainframe was telling her, multiple training programs were running at the same time.

She sighed to herself, listening to the screen crackle and chitter. “That idiot. I told him running more than one program at once is too dangerous.”

This wasn’t the first time she’d caught Keith doing some late-night training. Honestly, she found the training system running multiple nights out of the week. It was almost comforting, knowing that someone else couldn’t sleep, while staying safe and unknown herself. But, well, she guessed this time she’d have to confront him.

She slid out of bed regretfully, scooping her PDA off the sheets with a sweep of her hand. Not bothering to put pants on, she quietly snuck out of her room and down the hall. She made her way to the training bay, passing the main door and heading for the observation deck. As she approached the glass, she looked down on the bay to see Keith, lanky and dusted with beads of sweat, pulling his bayard from a fallen bot and facing down two others. His jacket laid discarded on the floor with its limbs akimbo, like a dead dog, leaving Keith’s knobby elbows exposed and all his angles protruding through his black undershirt.

Pidge circled the air with her finger, struggling to poke just the right invisible spot that would bring up the deck’s holo-display. When she finally got it up and checked what programs he was running, she was thoroughly unsurprised. The one-on-one combat training programs—Level 2, Level 3, and Level 4. As the bot Keith felled disappeared, bright blue text that said “Level 2 Complete” flashed across the screen.

Pidge turned on the intercom and snorted, “So, you figured out how to start all the programs on your own, huh?”

She saw Keith’s body stiffen, just as the Level 3 bot ducked in with a swift strike. He parried effortlessly and slashed back twice before strafing away just in time to dodge the Level 4 bot, who had just attempted to intercept. He didn’t respond. If Pidge didn’t know any better she would’ve thought he couldn’t hear her.

“We had an agreement. Remember?” She paused and drank in the silence, broken only by the clashing of Keith’s bayard against other swords. “I said, ‘I’m gonna run some calculations to make sure running all this shit at once isn’t dangerous, and if it is, you’re not gonna do it,’ and you said ‘Okay, Pidge. Of course. I’ll follow your advice because I truly value your wisdom and your compassion. I don’t deserve such benevolence.’”

Against his better efforts to remain silent, Keith grunted in response, “I never said that.”

A small smirk grew on Pidge’s face. “Sure. But you still promised you wouldn’t do it if it was dangerous. And I said it was dangerous.”

He had no clever response to that. He kept his eyes on the two bots as they circled him, the Level 4 bot crossing into his space with a quick slash, then another, and another, increasing in speed and accuracy the more that Keith deflected and parried. Pidge squinted, watching the flex of Keith’s wrists and the stiffness of his stance. He had something of an awkward, furtive grace that was unlike his usual style of fighting. An explosion forcefully dammed up, a chaos purposefully employed, wielded like a sharp dagger.

And was that … did she see bruises on him already? It was hard to tell from up on the deck, but she swore she saw big blooms of purple on his chest, cropped by the hem of his collar. No injuries on his arms, so far as she could tell, and everything else was covered, but that was a nasty mottling on his chest, and then up over his collar was a faint trail of—huh. Those weren’t bruises. A few nerves woke up and hummed at the base of her skull. Huh. Interesting.

Keith argued stubbornly, breath coming in short bursts, “Nothing dangerous has happened yet.”

“The keyword being ‘yet.’”

As the Level 3 bot darted in to flank him again, Keith turned his face to shoot an angry look at the observation deck. He casually caught the bot’s sword with his bayard. He didn’t feel the need to show her more than the sharp outline of his profile, smoldering eye glaring askance at her. As his head moved she chanced to see more pink and red marks on his skin, concealed beneath the dark fringe of mullet at the back of his neck.

Pidge gave an exaggerated shrug of her shoulders. “If you run that many programs at once, the Castle system gets confused. Every value in a simulation is determined by the system: the bots’ health bars, the win conditions and when a trainee has lost. But the system is only meant to keep track of one battle at a time. If it can’t keep track of all the different values for each simulation, it might not realize when you’ve won or when you’ve lost.”

“So?” Keith retorted haughtily, obviously not grasping a word of what she had said.

“ _So_ ,” she drew out the syllable sarcastically, “no matter how hard you hit those bots and no matter how hard they hit you, they won’t know when to stop. And at that point you have two options: destroy a priceless piece of training equipment, or—more likely—get clubbed to death and wind up a red paladin smear on the floor.”

Without even a shred of self-preservation, Keith replied predictably, “I’ll take my chances,” and just kept trading blows with the two bots. Pidge thought, if only he could see how small he looked up from the observation deck, his mullet just a black dot against the white sea of the floor, his sword a mere popsicle stick, the thin white skin of his neck flecked with purples and reds. Maybe then he wouldn’t think himself ten feet tall and mightier than statistical probability.

She lapsed into silence and observed for a little while longer, watching his gangly, jean-clad legs cut vaguely geometric patterns across the floor. She took a moment to appreciate his precision. Even just a few weeks ago his movements had not been this tight. He was always doing this, honing his skill when no one was looking, going out of his way to improve alone. Pidge felt a twinge of kinship in her heart.

The Level 3 bot came at Keith’s knees, and as Keith swung low to deflect its sword, the Level 4 bot finally got him, landing a blow that bounced off his ribcage. Pidge absently thought to herself that if this had been a real fight that would have been a fatal blow. She saw disgust flash across Keith’s face and knew he had just thought the same thing. Briefly, Pidge wondered if she shouldn’t be more concerned about training herself.

She saw the emotion bloom on his face into a flower of disappointment, anger, an emotion she couldn’t recognize on his face, one that was white-hot and magnetic. She twisted up her mouth, trying to gauge more information from his body language. His concentration was slipping, his stance and movements growing looser, and he seemed to realize that. The realization made him lose even more of his focus.

She pondered for a moment, eyes drifting to one of the bigger purple blotches below his collarbone. She asked, “Did something happen?”

“Nothing. Happened.” Keith bit out before she could finish her sentence. She snorted. So that was a yes, then. He gave her another condescending turn of the head. “Do you need something, or are you just here to nag me?”

Pidge scoffed, raising both eyebrows. “Just looking out for your ass.”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” Keith grunted, always a knife’s-edge of defensiveness.

Pidge rolled her eyes. Right. Sure. Keith Kogane, completely in possession of his own fate. Totally didn’t make self-destructive decisions on the reg. Okay.

Instead of arguing with him, Pidge turned her attention to her PDA. If he didn’t want to explain himself, then she just had to piece together some context clues. She pulled up a program she used for infrared images sometimes—similar to the one she used to measure the thermal radiation generated by the Castleship—and held up her PDA so that the small camera lens on its face caught Keith in its sights. His body appeared as a shock of bright, warm colors in the middle of a mostly-green infrared sea. The bots glowed blue as they swam around him.

As he moved, she watched reds and yellows roll around inside of him like a firestorm. Her eyes traced the patterns of heat and their location. Predominantly, she saw a roiling magma-like collection of yellow and orange spread evenly across his head, torso, and arms, cut by an undercurrent of red. So, she thought, he was angry. That was obvious enough. But as she continued watching, she saw the mass of yellow slowly dissipate until only his cheeks were bright. Dark red flamed through the rest of his face, smoldered lightly in his chest. Her brows furrowed. Was that … shame?

She dragged her eyes from the dancing colors on her PDA and looked at Keith. The rhythm of his feet was stuttering, a furious beat that he was visibly, desperately clinging to. Pidge felt a spark of warmth kindle in her chest, despite her building exasperation. Keith was a constant, reliable in his unpredictability. Easy to read, hard to figure out.

“Aren’t you tired? Lights out was over an hour ago. I thought you’d be asleep by now.”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Keith answered with a disbelieving tone, as if incredulous that she would ask a question with such an obvious answer. Another dull clang rang out from his bayard as he clashed with both bots at once.

Sighing through her nose, Pidge leaned her shoulder on the window to the deck, crossing her bare legs. So, someone had gone to town on Keith’s chest and neck, and he was ashamed, and now he was here training his heart out. Correlation does not equal causation, she admonished herself, but couldn’t help making assumptions. Hunk was the one he was in the habit of fucking lately, right? At least that’s what she gathered from Lance’s previous “card games” euphemism.

She held the PDA aloft in one hand, idly observing his heat signature. “You want to talk about it? Whatever problem you’re having?”

Keith’s head whipped around and finally she saw his face fully from the front, his black eyes wide, the light catching just so on his irises that they almost flashed purple. Deep in there, behind the knee-jerk reaction of frustration, Pidge almost thought she could see relief.

His eyes glanced up and down her body, the way a conscript evaluates a fellow soldier. He must have been disappointed with what he found, because he firmly told her, “No,” his eyebrows setting in hurt.

Irritation flared briefly in her gut. She maintained eye-contact with him as she casually drew her hand across the holo display, tapping out the command to deactivate both programs. The Level 3 and Level 4 bots jerked upright, bowed, and then disappeared behind two sets of panels in the wall that had opened up to receive them.

Keith chased after them, beating his fist once against the wall as the panels closed. He wheeled on Pidge, arms splayed, and shouted petulantly, “What the _hell_ , Pidge?”

She closed her thermography program and started searching through her PDA for something else. Not bothering to respond to his question, she pushed herself off the window and demanded in a loud, cheerful voice, “Do you like action movies?”

Keith’s expression melted into confusion. “What?”

The tinge of fire that lingered threateningly in his eyes made Pidge grin. A red and blue bruise glowed like an ember beneath the right side of his jaw. That kindling of warmth came back, this time strong enough that she almost felt some sympathy for him. Almost. He caught her looking, and absently lifted a hand to rub his neck, his arm just happening to cover up the splotches on his chest.

“Action movies. You never seen an action movie, Keith?”

“Of course I have,” Keith bit back. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“You seem like you’d dig action movies,” Pidge forged ahead while she pulled up a digital file. “Adventure and manly bonding? You’re totally the poster boy for that shit.”

She swore that his cheeks flushed pink in embarrassment. He growled, “Don’t change the subject. This is about my _training_. You stopped my training, and now you’re asking about action movies—the programs don’t matter, none of this _matters_ —”

When she turned her PDA around to show him the file she had loaded, he lost his train of thought and stopped talking. Pidge finished simply, “I brought one with me. From Earth.”

The file displayed a still image that showcased a fierce, white-haired swordsman named Varsok. The play button rested in the negative space between his snarling visage and that of a cripplingly-old woman who dangled a pocket watch between her wart-mottled fingers.

Keith craned his head in silent shock, the arch of his neck and surprised “o” of his lips almost reverent. “That’s … That’s _Silver Ronin: Village of Swinging Clocks_.”

Pidge gave him a proud smile. “Yeah. You know _Silver Ronin_?”

“It’s my favorite series,” Keith murmured in awe, growing disgruntled at his own lack of anger. He shot her a bitter look, which she felt was _extremely_ uncalled for. He gave up that information himself: it’s not like she pried his jaw open and forced the words out.

She smugly tapped the edge of the screen with one finger. “The Garrison played this on the entertainment system one time after classes. You would not believe what I went through to pirate it. It involved jacking at least three USBs into three different computers. And then I had to encrypt the whole movie to make sure no one could tell what it was.”

She flipped the screen back around and glanced at the still image of Varsok’s face and the long, silky trail of his white hair. It’d been a while since she’d watched this series. She remembered it being unbearably cheesy. Her dad and Matt loved it, so it had to be.

“It was worth it.” She smiled down at the screen. Bittersweet nostalgia bubbled in her chest. “Saved me a piece of Earth.”

When she looked back down at Keith, she found him stiff and guarded. He likely anticipated what she would say next.

She waved the PDA cordially, a white flag of truce that she had done nothing to earn. “Let’s watch it together. Watching people beat each other up is way more fun than getting beat up yourself. We can go back to my room and chill—I’ve got drinks.”

Keith’s fists clenched, his gloves two miniscule black weights hanging ramrod-straight at his sides. He was unwilling to give up their quarrel, but Pidge glimpsed a ripple of troubled emotion pass over his face—a flash of something acutely intelligent that saw deeper than what Pidge expected him to see. For a moment it left him vulnerable in a way that a personal threat to himself never could.

“Why should I?” Keith resisted weakly. A childish inflection chipped at his usual no-nonsense tone. Pidge’s eyes flicked to his chest again, and this time he didn’t bother to hide it, though his cheeks grew pink.

“Come on, Keith. I’d rather not be scraping you off the floor tomorrow morning.” He was unmoved by this plea of common sense. She gave him an uneasy smile and tried opting for some honesty. “Please? If you stay here I’m not gonna be able sleep tonight. Besides, I could use the company.”

He visibly struggled with himself for a few moments, opening and closing his mouth. When no words would come out, he wordlessly marched over to the wall, scooped his jacket up under his arm, and strode out of the training bay. A deafening silence fell over the area.

“I guess that’s a no, then,” Pidge sighed. She expected as much. At least she’d gotten him to leave for a while. She would have to keep her eye on the security cameras to make sure he didn’t come back.

Pidge left the observation deck, padding down the stairs. Well, _Silver Ronin_ was out. If she watched it by herself she’d just start thinking about home and get sad. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, pondering what to do next, she saw Keith leaning against the wall of the hallway a few feet off, arms crossed over his chest. She froze with her hand up to her face, mouth wide open in a yawn.

He shot her a look, irritation etched into the lines beneath his eyes. He waited silently, almost patiently. She drew up beside him, eyeing him curiously. He towered over her, meeting her gaze with a scowl. Then it softened into a frown as he prompted, “Well? Are we going or not?”

She smirked, giving him a playful punch in the arm. “Smooth.”

As Pidge headed off for her room, Keith followed quizzically. Even when he was being nice, Keith was all oil and fire. The boys must have really loved him back at the Garrison. And, well, Pidge guessed, at least one of them was loving him right now.

 

-

 

By the time the movie ended, all the sympathy had gone out of Keith. The two of them sat propped up with their backs against the wall, knees drawn, one half of the PDA resting on her knee and the other half on Keith’s. The credits rolled lazily across the screen, sound muted. Pidge could feel anger coming off him in waves of heat from where his arm pressed against her.

“How can you not like Varsok?” Keith demanded, gloved hands jerking toward the screen. “He’s the star of the film. The Silver Ronin.”

Pidge was beginning to get the niggling feeling that it was a bad idea to invite Keith to hang. She shrugged, “I don’t know. I prefer his sidekick. Varsok’s just … kind of basic. Milquetoast, I guess.”

Keith wheeled on her in shock, almost pushing her off the bed with the force of his movement. “Varsok is _such_ a complex character. Have you forgotten his backstory?”

Pidge wrinkled her nose. “Kind of.”

“His injury?” Keith asked, eyebrows drawing up so far that they were hidden by his hair. “His paralysis? His sensei wouldn’t let him fight for his home village because of it. It was a _huge_ plot point! They spent the whole second movie discussing it!”

Now that she thought about it, Pidge couldn’t actually recall having seen the second movie, but Keith didn’t need to know that. “I mean, that’s cool and all, but he’s still just, I don’t know, _typical_. A goody-goody. And then in this movie he gets all angsty when the town leaders won’t let him come back.”

She saw rage boil over on his face and for a moment thought he might actually grab her by the collar. Instead, in an impressive display of control, he scrubbed his face with both hands and took a deep breath to calm himself. He then held up his hands, palms facing out, and closed his eyes.

“Okay. Picture it,” Keith began. “I’m Varsok. I’m the village’s most beloved figure. I’m a brave adventurer going out to find resources for my clan, only to get hypnotized into killing everyone.”

He paused and glanced at her to make sure she was following along. She nodded, resisting the urge to make a smart-ass comment about how she didn’t need a poor, dry synopsis of the movie she had just seen.

“I have all these people I love, who respect me, and now they think I’m a monster. Even though I helped rebuild the village and paid my respects and saved literally _everyone_ in the end, they’re never gonna forget what I did.” He splayed his hands, a swell of emotion in his voice. “Can you even fathom how that must feel?”

This time she couldn’t help herself. She mimicked Keith’s voice, saying, “I’m Varsok, I get duped by an old hag with a pocket-watch and then get butt-hurt when no one forgives me for murdering half my hometown.”

Still exercising that inexplicable restraint, Keith gave her a deadpan look and calmly replied, “No, you’re not. I’m Varsok. I just said I was.”

Pidge gave a surprised laugh. He watched her in confusion as she closed the file on her PDA and shifted to face him. “Hypnosis isn’t even—you do realize that trick doesn’t work, right? Swinging a pocket-watch in front of someone’s face doesn’t just make them turn evil. They’ve got to have some part of them that already thinks they’re bad.”

He seemed suspicious, but this caution was outweighed by doubt of his own knowledge. Pidge could see why Lance loved messing with him. “Really?”

“Ch-yeah. It’s science, dude.” Pidge tapped each side of her head with a finger. “Brain science.”

Brow furrowing, Keith corrected, “You mean neuroscience.”

“Uh, yeah. That’s what I said. Brain science.”

“Neuroscience,” Keith insisted defiantly. He ignored her shit-eating grin and threatened, “I’m gonna look this up later.”

Well, Pidge thought, he can’t look it up until they are back on Earth, and who knows when that’ll be. Maybe when they return home he’ll actually remember to do it. Some things he grabbed onto and didn’t let go of. That’s just the way he was.

“So you _really_ find Varsok interesting?” she pressed. “None of his character arcs or attributes seem predictable to you?”

Sighing angrily, Keith said in a low tone, “Look, Pidge, if you only invited me to watch this movie so you could make fun of me, I’m going back to the training bay. I only came here in the first place because you said you were lonely.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned forward, bent in half so far that Pidge couldn’t see his face. A wave of solemnity washed over her. He wasn’t kidding. He was actually, really, seriously upset.

She sat up. “Hey, come on, I’m glad you’re here. Sorry, we all tease you, so I guess I’m just used to doing it.”

“I can take a lot but I can’t take shit from you guys all the time,” Keith retorted quietly, hunching in on himself.

She’d never seen him quite like this. She scooted over to the edge of the bed and leaned an elbow on his back. Now that they were level with each other, he obstinately turned his head away so she still couldn’t see him. Her eyes drifted to the marks dotting his neck, one bigger red splotch nestled in the spot where neck met his ear. She asked for the second time that night, “Did something happen today? Was Lance taunting you again?”

His whole body stiffened at the mention of Lance’s name. So that was a yes. Keith insisted, “I told you. Nothing. Happened.”

“Alright, alright, I believe you,” Pidge murmured. She paused, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling, and started to tap on the knob of his shoulder with a finger. “It’s just, Lance can be kind of an asshole, you know?”

Keith’s head swiveled toward her, his burning black eyes narrowed. She continued, “He acts like he’s got his shit together better than everyone else, but he’s a mess. Do you remember a while back when he got mad and started yelling at you about playing card games without him?”

He scowled. “I couldn’t help that. I didn’t know there were special rules for that. And then I invited Lance to play and he was still a jerk about it.”

His innocence was almost cloying in its sweetness. Careful to keep her face completely blank, Pidge told him, “There’s no rule about playing card games with other people’s friends.” He looked at her in confusion. “That was a euphemism. By ‘card games’ he meant having sex.”

His face went so white he was almost see-through. He gave her a wide-eyed stare that she held without blinking. When the color came back as ruddy stains on his cheeks, Pidge knew. Keith really was fucking Hunk. She could guess where all those bruises came from.

Keith was in the midst of his own mind-blowing discovery. He turned his gaze to the floor, disbelieving, and whispered, “He knew. This whole time, he knew. Then why did he—?”

“Because he’s Lance,” Pidge finished helpfully, and Keith gave a start as if he had forgotten she was still in the room, with her small hand resting comfortably on his spine. She assured him, “Not that anything happened. Because nothing happened. Right?”

He didn’t respond. He sat there for a while, no sound except for the frantic fluttering of his breaths. Eventually he shook her hand off, but still made no attempt to reply.

“Right,” Pidge confirmed for him. “Nothing happened.”

Keith chewed his lip, hurt written all over his face. And something else, something glowing with heat, with shameful curiosity. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? When we all had that conversation, you knew, but you didn’t tell me.”

“Neither did Hunk,” Pidge countered, eager to displace some of the blame. She quickly amended, “It was our problem, not yours. That time, he was way madder at me and Hunk than he was at you.”

He lifted his head, the red flush of his cheeks so bright Pidge swore she saw it reflected in the dark tint of his eyes. “But he told me—He said that it was social interaction one-oh-one—”

“And yet he never told you what ‘card games’ meant. Don’t you wonder why?”

She let that question hang in the air.

“I …” Keith swallowed, nervously rubbing his neck with a hand. He stood up and grabbed his jacket. “I think I need to go back to my room.”

A small part of Pidge shrank in disappointment. Oh well. She was sure that this was all a lot for Keith to handle in one night. He had already been pretty overstimulated when she found him in the training bay. No biggie, she’d just … find something else to do for the next few hours until sleep finally ran her down and put her in a headlock. No big deal.

As Keith cut a brisk path toward the door, Pidge called out, “Hey. Don’t let him get to you, alright?”

It was obviously too late for that. Keith paused, hand on the door frame, then left without a response. The moment he crossed the threshold, she pulled up her PDA again and followed him on the security cameras. His path took him past the training bay, and for an agonizingly long moment, Keith stopped and stared longingly at the door. He continued on down the hall and obediently entered his room. Pidge let go of her breath.

She flopped back against her pillow, idly watching the ceiling. Well, at least they wouldn’t be drawing a chalk outline of him the next morning.


	2. Communications

Pidge and Hunk sat across from each other, laptops wheezing, keys clacking furiously. Pidge rubbed the fog from her eyes and yawned, “I dunno what to tell you. All the zeroes and ones look like they’re in the right places.”

Hunk paused, thoughtfully cupping his wide chin. Through the scrim of tiredness, Pidge thought blearily that he looked like a very fat-buff version of “The Thinker.” Who made that again? Michelangelo? Someone who specialized in masterpieces.

“Is it an equipment malfunction then?” he wondered aloud. “If the coding is all correct, then it shouldn’t be a problem with any of the programs. You sure you didn’t miss anything?”

Pidge threw her arms into the air challengingly. “Double-check me. I got the eyes of a Flarpel.”

He shook his head and set about doing just that. She leaned back in her chair and stretched. Of course she hadn’t made an error, but if he wanted to burn some time, she wouldn’t say no. It was always useful to have another pair of eyes on her work.

She observed Hunk carefully, the way his mouth pinched in one corner and his eyes darted across his screen, making an efficient scan of hundreds of lines of code in only a few dozen seconds. She was glad that she wasn’t the only computer geek on this team. She couldn’t imagine being marooned in space with three other paladins who had likely never even heard of the phrase “html.” Fuckin’ jock boy pilots.

As if reading her thoughts, Hunk glanced over to find her watching. Pidge raised an eyebrow at him and he uneasily returned to his work. She smirked. Hunk could pilot a giant yellow lion and fly at the screaming speed of light to fight aliens but he still couldn’t handle a little sustained eye-contact. What an herbivore.

Pidge heard footsteps approaching from the right, and only had time to glance out of the corner of her eye before she saw Lance fling himself on the desk where they worked, both palms planted firmly on the surface. She took a moment to appreciate the sinuous line of his shoulders, back, and hips. She warmly regarded the dips and rises where muscle connected to major joints, just barely visible under his shirt.

“There you guys are,” he whined, and all the affection fled her body. “I’ve been looking for you all day.”

Without looking up, Hunk deadpanned, “Lance, I saw you an hour ago. Remember? Lunch? A quickie? Ring any bells?”

Lance’s lip puffed out in a pout. “So? That’s one twenty-fourth of a day. That’s a whole lot of day I spent looking for you.”

“What about me?” Pidge pointed to herself, pretending to be offended. With a great, theatrical flourish, Lance alighted on the side of her chair and leaned his elbow on her shoulder. She had to brace an arm around his waist to support him.

“Of course I was looking for you too,” Lance crooned, kissing her head. His charm wore off as quickly as it came, his eyebrows pinching together. He watched Hunk work with distaste. “What are you guys even doing?”

“The comms system is malfunctioning,” Pidge said, yawning again. “Coran got stuck in a room somewhere on the ship and tried calling for help but the comms were down. Thankfully Allura heard him yelling and got him out.”

“Nothing wrong with the code,” Hunk confirmed aloud. He rolled his eyes at the smug grin Pidge sent his way. “It’s gotta be some part of the equipment, but I don’t know where to start. What even runs the comms systems on this ship? Is it a terminal somewhere? A circuit board?”

Pidge grimaced. “I hope not. We might be soldering wires for the next three hours. I didn’t sign up for that.”

She felt Lance’s elbow dig sharply into her shoulder as he used her for leverage to push himself back up. Her faintly nasal cry of displeasure went unrecognized. He chirped, “Maybe I can help!”

“With what, exactly?” Hunk inquired with an edge of exasperation.

Lance crossed his arms over his chest. “I dunno! You said there was a terminal, right? Maybe I can go look for it, or whatever.”

Leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes, Hunk corrected with a sigh, “I said there _might_ be a terminal. Or it could be some piece of Altean technology only vaguely approximating a terminal.” His chin tipped up, a long and troubled inhale swelling the sculpted ridges of his neck. He raised one hand to pinch the bridge of his nose then paused, opening his eyes again. “Y’know, Lance, actually there’s something you can do. Can you go find Coran and bring him here?”

“Oh yeah, totally,” Lance exclaimed brightly, proudly putting his hands on his hips. “I’ll be super quick. Like, lightning-fast. I’m the Olympic champion of retrieving dudes.”

That last one made Hunk smile, albeit regretfully. As if that was the cue Lance had been waiting for, he beamed at Hunk and then Pidge before striding purposefully out of the room. Hunk called out after him, “Can you also drop by my room and pick up my toolkit?”

Lance flashed him a thumbs-up as he disappeared down the hallway.

Yet again, Hunk yelled after him, “Remember, you can’t call Coran because the comms are down!” He waited silently for a response and after receiving none snorted, “He didn’t hear me.”

“Honestly, Coran should’ve been here the whole time,” Pidge complained. He had insisted that this was only a programming issue and they could handle it without him. Said he had some incredibly important business with an unknown pink liquid with an alien name that Pidge’s limited grasp of Altean could not identify. Whatever it was, he was really passionate about dealing with it right away. Passionate in a way that was so angry that his moustache began wriggling like a bloated, orange centipede and never stopped. He was gonna be as sore as Pidge’s shoulder. Which was actually really sore.

As Hunk shrugged and returned to typing on his laptop, Pidge waited patiently. After a minute of sustained staring, Hunk caught her gaze and faced her, looking confused.

Pidge gestured expectantly with one hand to the doorway Lance had left through. “Not gonna tell me what that was all about?”

She already had a hunch, considering her previous run-in with Keith, but she needed some more information. Her own cursory, sparsely-detailed hypothesis needed some more evidence before it could become a proper theory.

Sighing again, Hunk leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table. He ran one hand through his hair. “He gets in a mood sometimes. He just … starts buzzing, and doesn’t stop, and he’s gotta be doing something or he goes crazy. I’m sure you’ve noticed it before.”

She lifted her shoulders in a vague gesture of agreement. Of course she knew, but a healthy dose of noncommittal body language went a long way in getting someone to elaborate.

Hunk rested his chin in his hand, staring across the table with unfocused exhaustion. “Most of the time I’m like, ‘fine, let’s do a thousand chores and get this out of your system,’ but I have my own life to live, you know? I can’t drop everything to help reassure him. And there’s some work I do that he can’t help with.”

Pidge felt a pang of sympathy. This was where relationships always seemed to go wrong. They crashed along that invisible line between emotional support and dependency. All the things that Hunk was too strong to say, Pidge could decode with a single look. The need for solitude. The bright burn of affection, which delighted in the too-closeness just as much as it abhorred it. The well-worn string of guilt tethering him to a side of Lance that was just too much, and the fear of losing something by making even one snip. The entire universe at his back, looming close enough to remind him of the isolation of being a paladin. A reminder that out here, with an empire to defeat, time could either end abruptly or stretch forever.

Personally, Pidge felt that the labyrinths of a relationship were darker and more merciless than the cold void of space. Filled with brighter stars, too, or so she had been told.

She uncomfortably shifted to lean across the table, trying her best to appear as empathetic and trustworthy as possible. From the look on Hunk’s face, she surmised that her efforts had imbued her with the air of a gnarled, old, potentially constipated crone.

“If you ever, y’know, want to talk about this sort of thing, I’m down to listen,” she told him, and she was surprised by her own sincerity. Apparently, Hunk was too. His eyes briefly widened and he laughed, pushing his forehead into his hand.

“No offense, Pidge, but you know next to nothing about how to deal with feelings.” He laughed again as her mouth twisted into a scowl. A big belly laugh that made it hard not to feel insulted, despite his disclaimer. “Besides, that’s personal stuff, between me and Lance. On a need-to-know basis.”

Pidge straightened her neck, tilted her chin up, and smoothed her expression into an impassive mask. She had honed the art of appearing unimpressed so finely that it was like merely tugging a rope in her brain, dropping a thick curtain, letting an object fall from her hand. Hunk felt the shift, his lips parting in a split-second, timid quiver. Her eyes were drawn to the motion.

She declared blankly, “It’s got something to do with Keith, right?”

The shock on his face gratified her down to the very tips of her fingers. So did the flush on his cheeks. “W-what? Are you saying that—no, _no_ , what are you talking about? It’s got nothing to do with Keith—”

“I would’ve pegged you as many things, Hunk. An engineer, a lover of hot dogs, and an enthusiast for diplomacy,” Pidge condescended, casually examining the grit under the nails of her left hand. She leered up at him from underneath her stubby eyelashes. “But I never would’ve pegged you for a liar.”

Hunk’s eyes grew big and round, filled with desperation. He even managed to make his eyes water a little. “Pidge, I opened up to you, and I’m really emotionally vulnerable right now, so the fact that you would even _think_ of calling me that is so hurtful. I’m honestly speechless. Speechless!”

Pidge rolled her eyes up. “C’mon, don’t give me the soft guy act. You’re hiding something.”

Her response threw him off-guard. In the blink of an eye she shifted gears, smoothly applying a layer of empathy to her face that covered her inconsiderateness as seamlessly as latex skin. She artfully added a few lines of sympathy to the skin of her eyelids and pushed her eyebrows together in a sorrowful crease for good measure. It took all her energy to sew together this heartfelt disguise. Let no one say she never went the extra mile for science.

“You should talk to me! You’ll feel better. You know I can keep a secret.”

“I mean, yeah, probably you can,” Hunk admitted, making her frown at his uncertainty. The line of her mouth softened as he dropped his façade of hurt and glanced askance at the flickering glow of his computer screen. “But this isn’t just my problem. I can’t give away other people’s private information.”

He leveled a stern, tar-black gaze at her. “You understand?”

She watched him, cataloging the shift in every crease of skin and muscle on his face. She did understand. It was none of her business, because Keith hadn’t consented to tell her anything. She splayed her hands and asked regretfully, “Worth a try, though, wasn’t it?”

Disconcerted, Hunk opened his mouth to respond, but closed it once Lance popped his head back in the room. He held out Hunk’s toolkit with one arm, waving it around proudly. “Look what I found!”

“Ah, thanks,” Hunk responded with an exhausted exhale, genuinely grateful to cut off the previous topic. He stood and took the kit from Lance, who gave him a peck on the cheek that made a spark of affection twinkle in his eye. “What about Coran?”

“He’s in the rec room. Had a spill or something? There was pink juice all over the floor. He was pretty cheesed about it.” Lance shrugged. “He said he’ll show you where the comms system is, but you gotta help him deal with his mess first.”

Hunk and Pidge exchanged a look of apprehension. Who knew what that liquid was, or what it’d do to the floors? Hunk groaned, “Well, I guess we have to. Want to just leave the laptops here?”

“Probably for the best, at least until we take care of that spill,” Pidge surmised, nodding. She leaned forward and brought up a command prompt on her computer. “Go on ahead without me, I’m going to run one more check on the system. It’ll only take a couple minutes.”

If Hunk recognized her clever ruse to avoid a few more minutes of contact with Coran’s weird pink alien substance, he blessed her by refusing to argue. He said to Lance, “Later,” and started down the hall.

As Pidge focused her attention onto her screen, she felt Lance lean on her side again, his chest pressed against her shoulder. His voice was suddenly beating directly against the shell of her ear, harsh and scratchy. He whispered conspiratorially, “I heard you guys were talking about Keith. Did Hunk tell you about what happened?”

Pidge froze. “No, he didn’t.”

She turned to find him brimming with agitated excitement, a hopeful smile on his face. “Want me to tell you about it?”

She wanted to smack herself. Why didn’t she just ask Lance? He was always bursting at the seams to gossip about his personal life, and any other person unfortunate enough to be caught in his orbit. She put her face in her hands, letting out a long and angry exhale. She was so stupid. She should’ve gone to him first.

“What’s wrong?” Lance asked. He sounded genuinely concerned.

She bridged her fingers over her nose and stared absently at the command prompt on her laptop, open and blinking. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Hunk has pointed out that my methods of collecting data are unethical,” Pidge murmured, slowly separating her fingers and poising them over the keyboard. “He’s advised me to have at least a modicum of respect for others.”

There was a brief period of silence where Lance processed all of her strange vocabulary. He threw his head back and moaned, “Oh my _god_ , you asked _Hunk_ first? You’re a dumbass.”

She was. That didn’t change the fact that Hunk was right. Some things were more important than her scientific curiosity.

“What if I need someone to talk to?” Lance asked, his voice surprisingly quiet and pained. She saw that agitation on his face again, stronger than before. “Were you just offering that to Hunk?”

She raised her eyebrow and shot him a disbelieving look. He argued insistently, “I’m serious. He’s dealing with this just fine, but I’m not. I really need someone to talk about this stuff with. Come on, Pidge. Are you here for me or not?”

She didn’t have an answer to that. And manipulative or not, Lance’s face still held some truthful grain of hurt and isolation.

 

-

 

Pidge hated not knowing things.

The unknown should have excited her, and occasionally it did. As a child, scientific experiments delighted her precisely because she could poke beakers and scrapers into the world’s vast, black pool of possibilities and scoop out a handful of knowledge. She’d be lying if she said that the endless supply of new worlds Voltron had already visited and would soon discover did not thrill her. She was on the edge of the universe—they were _all_ on the edge of the universe—and out here, nothing had a beginning or an end.

And that was terrifying. Amazing, sure. But still terrifying in that existentially dreadful type of way that waited until the high of scientific discovery passed to creep in and whisper the promise of death.

The darkness of the cosmos, lit up by liquid splatters of bright stars, had swallowed her father and brother whole. Without a warning, or even an apology. And that was the worst part; that in not even one corner of vacuous space was there an “I’m sorry.” On top of the fear was an anger she had become familiar with—the kind of anger that bruises eyes, bloodies knuckles, destroys cities and countries and planets.

She hated not knowing. Where Matt and her father were. If they were even alive. She hated not knowing if she would be strong enough to pay back what they suffered. Or brave enough.

Similarly, she really came to fucking hate not knowing what the hell was going on with Keith, Hunk, and Lance.

Three days had passed since Pidge asked Hunk for the low-down. When Pidge reported to the dining room to eat lunch, she found Shiro and Keith on one side of the table, already eating. Allura was perched on the chair at the head of the table, back perfectly straight, one hand folded over the other. Pidge’s gnarled computer geek spine hurt just by looking at her. Coran wasn’t around and neither were Hunk and Lance.

Shiro looked up, waving at her. As usual, Keith kept his focus on the most important thing: shoveling as much amorphous food goo as he could into his mouth. She was surprised Hunk hadn’t made the time to prepare their meals so that it somewhat approximated real food. And Allura—

“Oh, Pidge!” Allura turned her head, her earrings flashing under the light. “I thought only these two would show up. I know it’s somewhat sudden, but I was thinking we could have a training session with the lions today. Do you know where Hunk and Lance are?”

“Haven’t seen them all day,” Pidge shrugged, rubbing the back of her neck. Honestly, she hadn’t seen them much at all for several days. “Can’t you call them on the comms?”

Allura smiled regretfully, eyebrows drawing up. “The system stopped working again.”

“What? Already?” Pidge threw her head back and groaned. “We _just_ fixed the damn thing.”

“All of the Castle-ship’s systems are very old,” Allura admitted, casting her blue eyes around the room with an absent look of somber nostalgia and fondness. “I’m not surprised at least some things are poor condition.”

“Don’t worry about it, Princess. I’m sure it’ll be a cinch for Pidge and Hunk to fix again,” Shiro added gently from across the table, with an extra helping of praise to disguise the implication that Pidge complained too much. Which she knew. She didn’t need him to tell her that.

As Pidge turned toward the kitchen to get her food, Allura brightly called out, “Oh, and Pidge—”

She tapped her smoothly-manicured fingers on the table top, to the right of where she was sitting. She gave Pidge an expectant look, her self-assured demeanor befitting her status.

Pidge couldn’t help smiling a little. “Sure, Princess.”

She filled a bowl with her usual helping of Altean government-issue green food substitute and took a seat next to Allura. She spent most of the meal chatting with Shiro and decidedly not staring at Allura’s snow-white hair, which ran in thick rivulets over her shoulder. It blurred the curve of her spine, which was a shame. Not that Pidge was looking anyway.

She did, however, see that Allura wasn’t eating. She didn’t even have a bowl. She was just sitting patiently, back and arms stiff, the finger of one hand tapping at an even pace on the back of her other hand. She would stare at the doorway pensively for a while and whip her head around long enough to cheerfully interject on a conversation before looking away again. Her profile seemed carved out of marble—cool, collected, unreadable.

She was like that a lot of the time. Unreadable. Too much for Pidge’s comfort.

Eventually, Hunk and Lance arrived, with Coran trailing along after them. Both boys glanced over at Keith, and Keith met their gazes out of the corner of his eye. Puffing his chest out, Lance put his hands on his hips and greeted their captain with a friendly, “Hey, Shiro,” and a warm smile. He then lifted his chin and said blankly, “Keith.”

Keith didn’t say anything. He sat there, eyes black and dead as a crow’s, a spoonful of goop still puffing out his cheeks. He swallowed and Pidge could see a line of green trickling out of the side of his mouth, even from across the table. She suppressed a shudder. Fucking disgusting.

Seemingly unaware of the tension in the room, Allura repeated her announcement with the same vigor she had addressed Pidge. She called out, “There you are! I’m so glad you showed up. I’ve scheduled a training session with the lions today. I’m thinking we’ll do it after dinner. How does that sound?”

“Tonight, Princess? Shouldn’t we focus on getting the comms back up first?” Coran asked, resting his hand on the back of her chair.

“We just did a drill a couple days ago,” Keith finally piped up. He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and the goop came off in a crusted green smear. She noticed Shiro had also seen him do this, and they both exchanged a look of misery across the table. “We don’t need to do the same drills over and over every day.”

“I think it’s crucial that we always renew our commitment to becoming better paladins, and to connect with our lions,” Allura responded enthusiastically. She splayed her hands on the table, looking to the other paladins for agreement. “So I have prepared new drills.”

Hunk asked uneasily, “Do you mean ‘new’ as in ‘brand new’ or ‘new’ as in ‘old drills with slightly different protocol?’”

Allura frowned briefly before regaining her composure. She pressed both hands together and insisted, in a voice that was a bit too sharp to be convincing, “I have prepared new drills. You can rest assured. We should always be honing our skills, even if that means putting in a little extra time and effort. Don’t you agree, Pidge?”

All eyes in the room fell on Pidge. She froze with her spoon halfway to her mouth. She glanced at Allura, whose smile was blindingly radiant in its faith.

Pidge scrambled for a reply. “Uh, sure. Yeah. More lion time. That makes sense, with us being the paladins and all.”

Beaming, Allura placed a hand on Pidge’s shoulder and turned to face the others. “Pidge has the right idea. Well, of course, the green paladins are often the most connected to their lions, so that comes as no surprise.”

Everyone else in the room shot Pidge an incredulous glance. She resisted the urge to shrug and agreed, “Yeah. Me and Green are connected as hell. We’re practically carrying you all out on the battlefield. You scrubs need to step up your game.”

Hunk rolled his eyes and stalked off for the kitchen. Keith’s eyes trailed after him, glowing with an ember of hurt. If Hunk noticed, he didn’t stop to acknowledge it. Lance stepped in to block Keith’s line of sight and very snootily declared, “Well, _I’m_ with the Princess. We’ve gotta keep practicing to keep up with Zarkon.”

“Doing the same drills over and over is _pointless_ ,” Keith countered tersely.

“New drills!” Allura interrupted, lifting one finger. Pidge became briefly distracted by the thin translucent sheen of neatly-painted lavender polish on her finger. “They are completely new ones, I assure you.”

Coran’s mustache twitched upward in a disbelieving sneer. Not even Shiro looked like he was buying it, but he gave her a small smile and said anyway, “We’re all with you, Princess, you know that. We’ll be there tonight.” He turned to Keith, wordlessly seeking his surrender.

“Whatever,” Keith sighed, standing up and sauntering out of the room.

As Keith’s bright red jacket disappeared through the entryway, Shiro collected both of their bowls in one hand. He told Allura comfortingly, “Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll show. He just needs a little while to cool down.”

At that moment, Hunk returned with two bowls full of goop. He sensed the shift in the atmosphere almost immediately, glancing at the seat Keith had abandoned. “I was only gone for like, twenty seconds. What happened?”

Lance huffed, arms girded over his chest like steel cables. Eyeing the doorway, he muttered, “Seriously, what the hell is his problem?”

Brows furrowing in pity, Shiro admonished him gently, “I think you know the answer to that.” He circumvented the two boys and headed for the kitchen, leaving Lance to splutter uselessly at his back.

“Come on, Hunk, let’s get out of here,” Lance muttered. He stomped out of the room, turning back only once to yell to Allura, “We’ll definitely come to the drills! We’re serious about being paladins, unlike _some_ people.”

Hunk called after him, but Lance ignored him. His eyes flickered to Pidge’s briefly and she thought to herself with grim smugness, _I’ll bet he wishes he had talked to me now_. Having no other choice, he jogged out after Lance, making a hasty promise that they would see Allura after dinner. Shortly after, Shiro reappeared in the dining room just long enough to also bow out with a hasty goodbye. He waved to Allura and she held out her hand to wave back, visibly sagging in her seat.

Coran leaned over the back of her chair and commented in that weird way of his that could be frighteningly sarcastic or completely sincere, “Well, that went well.”

“This is why we always left the diplomacy to you back home,” Allura sighed, rubbing her temples with one hand.

“I couldn’t have done much better, Princess. This isn’t a battle made for winning.”

He patted her shoulder comfortingly and disappeared into the kitchen. As Pidge pushed the last of her food goop into her unwilling mouth, she kept an ear out. From the clanging and thumping that started up, she guessed he was performing maintenance on the dispenser.

Allura met Pidge’s eyes across the table and gave her a weak smile. One hand was still poised delicately at her forehead, the soft purple of her nails pressing shallow wrinkles into her skin. Pidge found herself wondering if Allura would ever get old, if Alteans ever truly got old, and if they changed when they did. Maybe Allura would look smooth and sleek until the day she kicked the bucket.

“What do you think the odds are of everyone making it tonight?” Allura asked.

Pidge puffed out her cheeks. “Well, you see, Princess, I’d need some quantitative data to give you that answer. And statistics work differently from regular numbers—even if the chances are high that something _will_ happen, that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed it _won’t_.”

Allura groaned, scrubbing her face with her hands. “No one’s going to show up, are they?”

Pidge couldn’t outright lie, but she at least managed a noncommittal shrug. “You know who has a 100% chance of showing up, though?” When Allura peeked curiously out from between her slim fingers, Pidge pointed to herself expectantly. “Me. And Shiro, probably.”

The joke earned her a tired but appreciative laugh. Allura bridged her fingers and laid her hands flat like a cot. She rested her soft, rounded chin on the backs of her brown knuckles. “I am not concerned about your capacity for teamwork.”

They let that comment hang in the air. So Allura had noticed too. The … interpersonal issues between some of their paladins.

Pidge stood, holding her empty bowl aloft in one hand. “Don’t worry too much, Allura. I’m sure we’ll get it worked out.”

Allura glanced up at her from under white lashes. That strange purple hue flashed from the depths of her pupils, firmly fixing Pidge’s attention. Allura rose from her seat and gazed down at Pidge benevolently, lifting her hand to take the bowl. Her warm palm covered the tips of Pidge’s fingers. The lavender nail of her thumb caught Pidge’s interest as it peeked over the side of the bowl.

“Yes. We will.” Allura smiled as she placed her other hand on the bowl, wordlessly promising to take care of it for Pidge. “And I will still be very glad to see you there tonight.”

She carefully slid the bowl from Pidge’s grasp and strode toward the kitchen, the hem of her dress dancing with each step. After a few moments, Pidge tore her gaze away and headed out of the dining room.

She blew out a big breath of air she had been holding in. She knew Altean standards for appropriate physical contact were different than those of humans, and Allura had quickly picked up the concept of physical boundaries, but sometimes she just … forgot, and lapsed back into touchy behaviors. Pidge could count on one hand the times in her life that a friend had made prolonged physical contact with her. One time was with Lance, and another with Hunk, but three times with Allura. And two of those times Allura had looked her straight in the goddamn eye without budging the entire time. The longest running record of simultaneous hand-and-eye contact was six and a half seconds.

That was another thing she hated not knowing: what Alteans considered “flirting.”

As she neared the end of the hall Keith’s angry voice cut through the air, spitting out a cut-off, “But you don’t _know_ —” Shiro’s calm voice began to overlap his, garbling the rest of his sentence.

Pidge immediately flattened herself against the wall and listened. They sounded like they were just around the corner. She edged a little nearer, heart pumping with anticipation. Fucking finally—maybe she’d hear something useful.

“He’s _antagonizing_ me, Shiro,” Keith growled. “Every day. He looks down on me, and if he’s not fucking with me for a laugh, he’s squawking at me like a goddamn bird.”

Pidge’s eyes widened. Whoa. He was actually yelling at Shiro. He _never_ yelled at Shiro, even if he was angry at somebody else.

Equally astounding was the fact that a thin crack seemed to be wearing in Shiro’s patience. His tone was quiet, gentle, with an edge of weariness. “Have you tried _talking_ to him? Not arguing, but talking?”

There was silence for a moment. Then Keith replied, tone creaking with disappointment, “Why do you always do this? I get that you’re our leader. I get that. You were a leader back at the Garrison, too, but you were still on my side.”

“Keith,” Shiro responded in a low breath, “I’m always on your side. And I know this is a difficult situation. But this is Voltron—even if we’re angry, we’re all stuck together. We have to learn how to communicate and solve problems, even when we have conflicting personalities.”

The sound of Keith’s boots stomping in aggravation made Pidge jump. At first she thought maybe he was running away, but his voice returned, pleading, “You see that he’s being unreasonable, right? Can you at least admit that?”

“We have to be willing to meet each other halfway, even when we disagree,” Shiro repeated with a soothing detachment that even Pidge found annoying.

“Right,” Keith scoffed, wounded. “I forgot. You’re on everyone _else’s_ side too. That’s what being a leader is, right?”

“Keith—”

“Look. Just … leave it, okay?” Keith sighed, and Pidge could feel the air freeze even from her concealed spot in the hallway. “I get it. It’s my problem.”

“Keith, that’s not the way it is and you know it,” Shiro argued with exasperation. Keith’s boots began clomping down the hall in a determined stride, gradually fading further and further. “Keith. Keith! Shit.”

And then Shiro was down the hall after him, pointlessly trying to pursue the conversation. Pidge could imagine his face—soft, hurt, and confused, with jagged furrows cutting into his forehead and the lids of his tired eyes. She couldn’t even begin to conceive of what Keith might look like. Anger? Sadness? That boy was a kaleidoscope of negative expressions, and there were a million ways those two emotions could mix on his face.

She made a conscious effort to detach herself. She imagined flicking a light switch in her head, turning off the handle of a faucet. And just like that, no more attachment. It should be that easy to stop caring about some dumb episode that a bunch of stupid boys had about whose dicks went where and who was or was not invited.

But she couldn’t. She hated this.


	3. Taking the Edge Off

Back in the Garrison, Pidge had only met Keith once.

There was a brief sliver of time, no deeper than a papercut, between when Pidge enrolled and Keith vanished to … an old and isolated cabin out in the dust? The nearby rough and rocky caves? Somewhere thick with history and angst. Point was, they only existed in the same space for about a month before Keith disappeared.

She didn’t give a shit about him. In fact, she had no idea who he was. She was an engineer, and generally only flew aircraft with Hunk and Lance. Keith was still flailing around in whatever special program the Garrison created for their top-ranked students, and when he wasn’t performing drills, he certainly wasn’t socializing. He was a name that floated around in ridiculous, over-exaggerated hushed whispers throughout the canteen, so much so that the only thing Pidge ever came to associate with the word “Keith” was the bad breath of upperclassmen.

The single time she met him before Voltron was on the roof of one of the Garrison bunkers. She had snuck up there in the late afternoon, in between the shifts of the soldiers patrolling the outer grounds. She carried a circular drone, a small wrapped-up package, and a home-made remote control device under her arm. One edge of the bunker’s roof overlooked a small, uneven strip of ground where a few government-issue jeeps were parked. The patrol squad picked them up there before starting their rounds, and left them there when they went on break.

When she climbed onto the roof and ambled over to that edge, she saw a young man in the Garrison’s typical garish orange-and-white garb sitting cross-legged and hunched over. Or, rather, he saw her, the two dark pinpoints of his eyes trained on her since the moment she emerged on the rooftop. The first emotion she could remember feeling at that time was immense disgust that even now, decades into the development of space exploration, some kids still couldn’t let go of the fucking ‘80s and their choppy mullets.

“The roof is closed to students,” Keith had barked out.

She raised one eyebrow at him as she approached the edge of the roof, pulling her parcels out from under her arm. “And you’re not a student?”

She knelt and set the drone upside-down on the ground, popping open a compartment. She began unwrapping her package, the brown paper crinkling loudly as it unfolded.

With that same vicious Keith-typical prickliness that Pidge would soon become accustomed to, “I said, roof’s closed. Get out of here.”

“What’re you gonna do? Report me?” Pidge replied, curling her lip and splaying her hands. “I’ve got a sterling record and engineering scores higher than you can probably count. What are _you_ worth?”

That shut him up long enough for her to finish unwrapping in peace. She pulled from the paper two small, cylindrical containers, which she then loaded into the drone’s compartment. She closed it up and turned it over, and then pulled out her remote controller. She tapped out a few commands on the digital display and the drone whirred to life, rising into the air.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught Keith’s wary glare, and saw him shifting into a kneeling position. She asked him casually, “Watch this shit. I’m about to vandalize the chief patrol officer’s car.”

His eyes widened in surprise. “You’re what?” He looked to the drone, some genuine concern finally dawning on his face. “Are you going to shoot it?”

She scrunched up her nose, staring at him confusion. Her? Access to artillery drones, in the middle of the desert, at an academy where students could get in trouble for carrying a bread knife back to their quarters without permission?

“Just watch,” she told him.

She piloted the drone off the rooftop, sending it on a rapid descent toward the jeep-like military vehicle belonging to the current chief patrol officer. She decisively executed a command prompt on the controller’s screen and as the drone swooped over the car, a deluge of paint shot out from a nozzle on its front, streaking the camouflaged hood and front window in hideously clashing ketchup-red and mustard-yellow paints.

“Whoa,” Keith said in numb shock.

Pidge grunted in satisfaction and held her middle finger up to the chief’s vehicle. “Fuck you. Try carrying out tactical maneuvers now, you jackass.”

“What’d the guy _do_ to you?”

Pidge pressed her mouth together in a thin line. “He was parading around, talking about shit he knows nothing about. You know the Kerberos mission?”

At the time, she never could have understood why Keith went so rigid. Nor could she have anticipated the dark, dense black hole that opened up in his eyes. He asked quietly, “What about it?”

“He had some negative assumptions about the outcome of the expedition. Unverified assumptions.” Instead of elaborating further, she handed him the controller. “You want to try?”

His gaze flicked between the controller and her face. For the amount of distrust he was actively displaying, he accepted the controller pretty quickly. In that instant the thought crossed her mind that he might take it and run, and actually report her, but she didn’t really care. She wasn’t afraid of him. She wasn’t afraid of the chief patrol officer, either, or any of the other staff. The Garrison had sent Matt up into space and lost him. The Garrison was a fucking joke.

She felt kind of limp-dicked herself. They had lost Matt, and all she could do was spit paint on the chief patrol officer’s car with some weird, mullet-haired loser. This seemed like such a pointless thing to get mad about—a world that didn’t consider her feelings, that forgot simple courtesies for irrelevant human beings. The Holt family was just one cluster of atoms in a limitless universe. The anger that built up inside of her was too big to hold inside, but too small to be important.

She couldn’t remember much more about that time except being frustrated and miserable. She was pretty sure Keith never really enjoyed himself, thought she remembered him making some pretty energetic, self-satisfied exclamations at the vandalized vehicle. It wasn’t fun, but for a little while, she felt less lonely. It had been a long time since someone met her on her own level.

After the paint ran out, she replaced the vials. And when those vials ran out, they sat on the rooftop, numbly watching the paints marble on the hood of the car and drip down in rivulets over the inset hubcaps.

 

-

 

The time for drills came. They all met in the hangar, more than one of them remorsefully clutching their helmets. Everyone showed up, even Coran, who surely had more important things to do. Everyone but Keith.

“Has anyone seen Keith since lunch?” Allura asked, in the vain hope that she could still pull this off.

“Just like him to run out on a drill,” Lance scoffed, turning up his nose. “Probably off throwing a tantrum. Who does he think he is?”

Allura desperately turned to Shiro. He just gave her a hopeless look and shrugged. His eyes were rimmed with the faintest hues of purple, creased with thin lines. Pidge wondered if he and Keith continued their argument from earlier in the day.

Concerned and a little guilty, Hunk asked Allura, “Do you want me to go find him? There’s only a handful of places he could be.”

“Even if you find him, I’ll doubt you’ll be able to make him come,” Shiro interceded. “He gets … stubborn when he’s like this.”

“Keith? Stubborn? That’s news to me,” Lance remarked sarcastically.

Shiro frowned, eyebrows furrowing. “More than normal.”

Pidge plopped down on a supply box, hunching over to rest her elbows on her legs. She watched Allura from behind, who seemed bedraggled, holding up both hands in a useless attempt to dispel the sudden tension in the room.

“It wouldn’t hurt to at least try to talk to him,” Allura suggested gently to Shiro.

The expression on Shiro’s face was infuriatingly calm and paternal, as if he had some deeper knowledge of Keith, or life, or the state of the universe that none of the rest of them had acquired. He firmly responded, “I’ve tried, Princess. He doesn’t want to talk. He’ll come around when he’s ready, and until then we just have to do without him.”

Lance scoffed, “Why do we even need him? If he doesn’t want to do his part for the team, let’s just run the drills without him.”

“They’re meant for the whole team,” Allura replied firmly. “We can’t do them without Keith.”

“Maybe we can … I dunno, adjust them?” Hunk proposed hopefully. “What were you planning? If you had some battle formations recorded somewhere, we could take a look at them and work something out.”

Allura staunchly argued, “The battle formations involve forming Voltron. We cannot do the exercises completely if you can’t form Voltron, and you can’t form Voltron without Keith.”

“We can still practice connecting with our lions without forming Voltron,” Lance pressed, regaining some of his usual cheer. “Hunk’s right, if we just cut out the Voltron part, and maybe change up some of the other stuff, we can do this just the four of us. Right, Shiro? Pidge?”

He looked expectantly at the two of them. Shiro opened his mouth and looked away noncommittally, trying to figure out what to say. Pidge just raised an eyebrow and shot him a deadpan look.

Lance gestured toward each of them. “See? Everyone agrees.”

Pidge couldn’t see Allura’s face. All she could see was Allura’s manicured fingertips rising to each temple, the swell of her ribcage and waist as she drew in a breath.

When she spoke, her voice was perfectly smooth and balanced, possessing an elegance so fine that it could cut oxygen. “Forget it. We just won’t do drills today.”

“But Princess—”

“We’re not doing this without Keith,” she repeated firmly, but still with that delicate air. She gestured toward the door to the bay. “Thank you for your trouble. You’re all dismissed.”

She held that pose like a statue, unflinching, until Lance and Hunk exchanged an upset glance and walked away. As Shiro moved toward the door, he said plaintively, “Allura—”

“Go, Shiro. Everything will be fine,” she replied in a mechanical way that implied everything was most certainly not fine. And Shiro—along with all his self-possessed righteousness—left.

Only Allura and Pidge remained in the bay, Allura with her back still facing Pidge, the curves of her white dress carving a captivating silhouette out of the bay walls. After a few quiet moments, she turned to look at Pidge with an unreadable expression. Neither of them spoke a word.

Allura came over and Pidge scooted aside so she could sit down on the box. She folded her dark hands over her knees, staring down at the floor. That small crystal of amethyst in her pupil shone intently.

Pidge offered, “It was a good plan, Princess. You couldn’t have known Shiro was going to be a huge tool and ruin everything.”

Allura snorted, and while the sound was derisive, a tired smile still floated onto her face.

“He means well. But sometimes he wears me out. His … flaunting how much more he knows about everyone than me. He pretends he knows what is best for everyone. That comes with leadership, I suppose.” She sighed and rubbed a temple. “None of us know what is best.”

Silence fell between them for a few moments. Well, okay, more than a few moments. It took a lot of yelling at herself internally for Pidge to finally gather her courage and ask, “Are you okay, Allura?”

Allura sat up, her eyebrows furrowed sadly. Each hair curved like a line hand-drawn in white charcoal. “Yes, I am. But everyone else is not. I am a leader—it’s my job to bring my forces together. Perhaps it is just the difference in our ways of life, but back on Altea, there was very little that could not be talked about. We could share everything, even between commanders and soldiers.”

“Everything? Even romantic stuff, or sex stuff?” Pidge asked, shooting her a disbelieving look.

“Of course,” Allura responded immediately, her expression earnest and genuine. “Romantic and erotic issues were some of the most common that plagued our soldiers. There were of course rules about who could speak to whom in the royal family, and social expectations, but I cannot count the number of times that my father listened to young men’s experiences extensively. It may not always have been palatable, but that is just something you just _do_. Or that _we_ did, anyway.”

Pidge nodded, “Yeahhh, we don’t do that so much on Earth.”

“Why did all the paladins have to be from Earth? Such behavior is not quite so unusual elsewhere in the galaxy,” Allura bemoaned, lips puffing in a slight pout.

“This kind of thing happens all the time back home,” Pidge said in a way she hoped sounded reassuring. “Humans are just like that. Sometimes they keep their problems to themselves, even when it’s not great for them.”

“Like you?”

Pidge turned and met her eyes. Inside Allura’s gaze there was something deep and unfathomable—the part of her that had aged during the century she slept in cryo-stasis. Pidge felt frozen in place.

“You left us once,” Allura continued, casting her eyes to the floor. Even her lashes were white, a silver protective canopy. “Because of your family. You let the fear and anger get to you—though I don’t blame you for it. I surely would have felt the same.”

“You sure? Because it sounds like you blame me for it,” Pidge retorted, somewhat defensive.

Giving her an exasperated look, Allura pressed on without further acknowledgment. “We didn’t talk to you. Nobody realized how important finding your family was to you, to the point that you would give up the whole universe. I should have known, when I would have given everything to have my own father back. But nobody ever asked. If we had, maybe you wouldn’t have left.”

Pidge’s face softened. She mumbled, “I probably still would have.”

That made Allura fall silent, face molded in a tight mask. When she didn’t start talking again, Pidge put a hand on her shoulder and said quietly, “I’m sorry. For leaving. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t want an apology,” Allura sighed, scrubbing her face with her delicate hands. “I just don’t want it to happen again. When we refuse to open up and understand each other, we fall apart. That’s how people lose those that they care about. I don’t want to lose any of you.”

Pidge squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Princess. That’s not gonna happen. We all know what’s at stake if we lose a member of Voltron.”

“That’s not—Voltron’s not—” Frustrated, Allura covered her mouth with both hands and closed her eyes. When she opened them she turned back to Pidge and said calmly, “Now, when we all finally seemed to be getting closer, a crisis has happened, and I am not allowed to know what it is. I am not allowed to help. You can still lose a person even when they are right beside you.”

“You’re not going to lose anyone,” Pidge told her firmly. “It’ll be okay.”

Allura’s eyes searched her face, picking out any weaknesses with more thoroughness than even Pidge could muster. She did her best to hold an unflinching façade, and just when her eyelid began to twitch from the strain Allura rested her head on Pidge’s shoulder. Pidge swore she could feel the heat of Allura’s cheek through the paladin armor. Not knowing what else to do with her hand, she tentatively curled her arm around Allura’s other shoulder, gently grasping the knob. Silver hair spilled into her lap, across the shell of her stomach.

She hated this. She hated this feeling. The hopelessness, the silence. Lance and Keith’s pride, and Shiro and Hunk’s detachment, whom she had once thought arrogance could not touch. And then there was herself.

She had to do something. Allura had tried, and there was no one left.

 

-

 

That night, she found exactly what she expected on the surveillance feed. This time when she plodded down to the training bay, she put on some proper pants and shoes. She left her tablet behind. Judging from Keith’s reaction last time, she expected the bay doors to be locked, only to find that a simple tap on the control pad made them slide open.

He had already slain the Level 2 bot by the time she strolled in. He turned around, glaring daggers in her direction. The marks on his neck had begun to fade into lighter, pastel shades of red, purple, and blue.

“I already told you last time,” Keith ground out threateningly, “Leave me alone. I don’t need your nagging. The stupid programs will be fine. I will be _fine_.”

Pidge shrugged, raising her eyebrows at him. “Sure. I get it. You just want to fight, right?”

He stared at her in confusion. While his eyes searched her face, the Level 3 bot approached from behind and raised its sword. Pidge swiftly pulled her bayard from her pocket and lunged forward, deflecting the incoming blow with the sharp, green edge. In the brief opening she made a short jab into the bot’s abdomen, sending it backward a few feet with a burst of green electricity.

She angled a nonchalant glance at Keith, hoping he couldn’t read the tension she felt at the thought of how close that bot’s sword came to her hands. If he could, his astuteness was thoroughly overwhelmed by his stupefaction.

“If you want to fight, then fuck it. Let’s fight,” she declared confidently.

The surly expression that grew on his face was meted by fascination. A bright star glimmered deep in the dark mass of his eye. “I want to be alone. This is my fight.”

She shot him a deadpan look, resting her hands on her hips. “I know you want to prove yourself, Keith, but the only thing that queuing up a three-against-one fight proves is that you’re trying too hard.”

He scowled, preemptively raising his bayard as the Level 4 bot tried to flank him from the side. The Level 3 bot approached once more from the front. “And what does a three-against-two fight prove, exactly?”

“That you’ve got friends,” she responded, straining every muscle of personal restraint to keep from scoffing at him. The fact that she had to dodge another swing from the Level 3 bot helped give her a moment to check herself.

She could tell he wanted to respond, but instead he chose to cross swords with the bot at his side, stubbornly fighting off its advance with three swift blows. The sound of the clash rang out, like steel, but too uncanny, just a little too alien. Three strikes turned into three more, and Keith was fighting off a continuous assault without pause. The Level 3 bot charged Pidge’s front with wide slashes that were hard to intercept from such a close range. She deflected the bot’s sword with her bayard while continuously stepping backward to increase the distance between them, each contact bringing that blade too close to her white knuckles.

As she frantically fought off the attack, she quickly realized that the bot was trying to isolate her from Keith, and felt some slight measure of disappointment. Sure, this bot was strong, but she had expected more from its strategy. After dodging one particularly vicious slice, Pidge darted under the bot’s swing and jogged a few feet behind it. She detached the green blade from her bayard and threw it like a lasso at the Level 3 bot, which had just flawlessly recovered and turned to swing at her again. The grappling line wrapped snugly around its arm and she yanked hard, bringing the bot stumbling onto both knees. She ran back toward where Keith was battling the Level 4 bot, dragging their other opponent across the ground behind her. She could hear its metal kneecaps hissing against the floor as she gave another mighty heave, flinging it toward the Level 4 bot, just barely clipping Keith in the process. The two droids crashed to the floor in a heap of metal limbs.

As she retracted her blade into her bayard handle, she saw Keith angle a glance at her, shock and awe burning bright in his eyes.

“How did you do that?”

She scoffed, “I’m a fuckin’ paladin.”

The sound of the bots pulling themselves up drew hers and Keith’s attention. They shot each other a wordless look and raised their weapons, hunching in a little closer to one another. Pidge couldn’t exactly say she was excited to risk herself in a bout of ridiculous, punishing training—but she did feel like she had been plugged into a socket. She could afford to live a little. It was better than the alternative.

 

-

 

The fight took them about an hour, and left them in a sweaty mess on the floor. They were sprawled out on the ground at odd angles from each other, staring up into the bright lights of the training bay. Keith said nothing, his ragged breaths bouncing violently off the shell of Pidge’s ear. He was angry with her again, but she guessed she _did_ go a little too far there toward the end, what with jumping on his back after the battle was over and engaging in some friendly fire. She bet he enjoyed it, though, somewhere deep inside. Probably.

After lying still in her own sweat long enough to feel clammy, she asked him, “Do you feel any better?”

“No,” Keith sighed bitterly, sitting up. A huge, disgusting sweat stain bloomed on the back of his shirt, a darker shade than black. Pidge’s mouth curled in disdain.

She pushed herself up into a cross-legged position, slumping tiredly over her lap. She insisted with a zeal she didn’t actually possess, “Let’s go another round, then. Come on. Three on two this time. Four, even.”

He turned toward her, wincing. “Why can’t you just let me be upset?” he asked, exasperation filling his tone with a light, breathy quality. “I’m never allowed to get angry. Someone’s always getting on my case, or telling me I should be better, or telling me I should be understanding—and now even Shiro is—”

He stopped, took a deep breath, and ran the back of his hand over his moist brow. Jet black hairs clumped together in a big, patchy papier-mâché paste near the left side of his forehead.

Pidge felt more disgruntled than ever. She struggled to figure out what the fuck to say; she’d be damned if she proved Hunk right about her lack of emotional ability. She gestured at Keith emphatically with both hands, prodding, “Okay, then be angry. Right now. Say angry things.”

“Look, Pidge,” Keith grumbled, scrubbing his face with both hands, “I get it. You’re trying to be nice. I get that, and I appreciate it, and—” He paused, mouth pursed in a grimace, weighing his next words. “This has been good. But I don’t want to _talk_.”

“I’m not trying to make you stop being mad,” Pidge pushed, dabbing the sweat away from her own face with her forearm. “I don’t give a shit about that. I just want to know _why_ you’re mad.”

“You _know_ what happened. That last time, in your room—”

“I made some educated guesses,” Pidge interrupted, doing her best to look as unimpressed as she felt. “That doesn’t tell me what happened at all. Look—if you tell me, I’ll leave you alone. I’ll let you activate as many programs at a time as you want. You won’t hear a peep from me for the rest of the night, or this week, or this month if you want me to. Just tell me what Lance and Hunk did to you.”

He slowly looked up at her with a strange expression, the frustration in his face melting with surprise and a sweet hurt. She saw just a glimpse and then he had turned away, cheeks burning in embarrassment, seeming mad at himself.

He lowered his head, unwilling to meet her eyes. Waiting patiently for him to speak was one of the hardest things Pidge had ever done. But eventually he muttered, as if to himself, “Just a couple of nights. That’s all I wanted. Maybe one or two nights a month, just to take the edge off.”

“With Hunk,” Pidge guessed.

His hands curled like claws against the solid fabric of his jeans. He hissed quietly, “This is stupid. This is fucking stupid.”

Frowning, Pidge replied sternly, “It’s not stupid. This is everyone’s life right now. This is your life. Besides, everyone gets boners, Keith, even me.”

He scowled up at her briefly before turning his eyes back to the floor. He had to take a few deep breaths to collect himself. “Hunk understood. He promised there would be no strings attached. Lance acts like I’m an inconsiderate asshole, but I fucking _asked_ how Lance would feel—Hunk said it would be fine!”

Again his composure began to break down and he visibly struggled with his words, flinging his arms out angrily at both sides. He continue with flustered breaths, “He told me he’d keep it a secret! But then, a few days ago we were in his room, and Lance—he just—he’s always so—”

She astutely surmised, “So … he saw you guys together, got mad, and then you got kicked out with your dick out. Is that right?”

“Pidge, _stop_ ,” Keith pleaded, humiliation lilting in his voice. She obeyed for once, watching as he covered his face, as if he could wipe the fire from his cheeks with his hands. “I left. Lance was bitching, and I didn’t want to hear it. So fucking what?”

She was baffled by his accusatory tone. “‘So’ nothing. Lance is an ass. If I was you, I’d be pissed too.”

He didn’t seem to know how to respond to that. He opened and closed his mouth, eyes darting about aimlessly. Giving a frustrated growl, he lamented, “I just wish this had never happened. All I wanted was one or two nights. Was that really too much to ask?”

They both sat there in silence for one long minute. It really wasn’t that much to ask, especially considering that Pidge knew Lance was only being an asshole because he wanted to fuck Keith too. But well, they were here, and there was no way to go back in time and help them have a civil conversation.

Groaning, Keith sprawled back on the floor again, folding his arms over his eyes. Pidge watched his chest rise and fall as his core continued to cool down, each breath a longer draw than the last, pushing the outer layer of his muscles out farther.

“Does it have to be Hunk?” she asked. “The thing that ‘takes the edge off.’”

He tensed, barking out sharply, “There’s nobody else.”

“Does it have to be a person?”

He paused, lowering his arms and giving her a confused stare. He asked cautiously, “What other option is there?”

“Dude, we have technology. I can just _make_ you somebody.” She splayed both hands and shrugged, clarifying, “Well, somebody’s dick, anyway—even I can’t make an entire person from scratch. But, you know, like a fake dick. A toy.”

“No you can’t,” he shot back in disbelief, launching into a sitting position again. A fresh layer of red painted his cheeks.

She insisted, “I absolutely can. I used to do silicone modelling back on earth, for other things. A dildo—” Keith slapped a hand over his face when he heard that word, “—is just a 3D model. It’s the same thing. And talk about no strings attached, Keith—you couldn’t attach emotional strings to a toy even if you wanted to.”

“You’re full of shit. And even if you could, that’s just crazy,” Keith admonished, so tightly he almost squeaked.

“I could do it. You _know_ me. I totally could.”

To her complete amazement, once his utter shame eased up a little, he actually seemed to be considering her words. Her eyes were drawn to the nervous movement of his mouth, teeth anxiously biting into the soft pink of his lower lip.

“I,” he started hesitantly, fearfully, “You—So you can just get one of those, and use it on yourself. Just for you.”

“Yes, it would be just for you. You wouldn’t have to ask anybody, or answer to anybody,” Pidge assured him, feeling enthusiasm mount in her chest. He was actually considering it. Somehow, she felt, she was reaching the light at the end of this whole giant space tunnel they were all knocking around in together.

He fisted a hand in his hair and spat out, “This is stupid. This is really stupid. There’s no way I’m gonna do that.”

“But it might help you.”

He went quiet, teeth still buried in his lip. He murmured, “Will it really, though?”

Pidge cocked her head. “It can’t hurt to try, right? Look, how about this—I’ll make one and you can just try it for a while. If you like it, then I’ll make another, better one that you can keep. And if you hate it, you can throw it away.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “And you? What do you get out of this?”

“Data. It’ll be like a science experiment, except instead of mixing beakers I get to practice making dildos.” Keith chafed a little less at that word this time. “I’ll be honing my craft, and learning.”

“You’re gonna ask me to do something weird, aren’t you?” Keith guessed, instinctively angling his body away from her. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Typical prey response.

She met his eyes so he would know her sincerity. “I’m not gonna ask you to do anything you don’t wanna do. I’m just asking you to try.”

He searched her face intently, in a way that made her feel just as much the object of research that he himself was about to become. He took a deep breath, blew it out, and quietly whispered, “Okay.”


	4. Pioneers

Pidge returned to Keith a few days later with a prototype for him. He was beet-red and furious, but Pidge could hardly remember a time when Keith wasn’t angry. She half expected him to kick her out of his room when she produced the home-made dildo from her carrying bag, but when he didn’t, she immediately felt that steel barrier that had always been between them come down.

He held it flat in his palms, painfully awkward. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “ _You_ made this?”

“Yup. First one,” Pidge told him, feeling a hint of pride.

“It doesn’t look like it,” Keith muttered, and though he certainly didn’t mean it as a compliment, she chose to take it as one. He was right—the curved purple shaft had been sculpted very smoothly with a silicone substitute, and a second very similar material acted as a firmer, spherical base that arced up the sides of the shaft in a triangular slant. She had worked very hard to put a little artistic flair into the design. Made it seem professional, and she knew professionality would go a long way to keeping Keith on board.

“I know in theory how it’s supposed to look, and how the electrical parts work, but I don’t know all the nuances of making the most optimal, user-friendly experience. I also had to find substitute materials, make sure they were safe for the human body …”

Pidge saw that Keith was just barely paying attention, still unnerved by the alien device resting in his hands. He cautiously curled the fingers of one hand around the base, red to the tips of his ears.

She continued, “The first one isn’t going to be perfect. So while you’re using it, keep some mental notes, and let me know what was good, and what could be better. I’ll check back periodically and then use that data to make new ones.”

Keith’s hand accidentally made contact with a hard plastic bit on the end of the dildo, and his whole arm jerked away from it. The color rose even higher in his cheeks, spreading down to his neck. “This switch—”

“Yeah, it’s a vibrator. Cool, huh?” Pidge smirked. She completely ignored the horrified look on his face and dug into her bag, pulling out a little bottle filled with clear liquid. “Oh yeah, you’ll need some lube, too. Also tested—it’s completely safe for human consumption.”

Keith seemed very skeptical. “How did you even _test_ that?”

“You don’t wanna know,” she told him dismissively. “Just trust me, it’s fine. You won’t break out in a rash, or melt, or get a horrible wasting infection from it. At least not in the short term. If it makes you uncomfortable, just think about the whole thing as a scientific experiment. The first human space dildos—we’re real pioneers, here.”

Thankfully he didn’t ask any more embarrassing questions after that. She left him to his business and went about her daily duties, hoping that with this new device—after the right adjustments, of course—would give Keith enough relief that he felt he could face Hunk and Lance on equal footing.

After a few days her plan seemed to be working, because Keith started attending meals and giving somewhat polite, albeit cursory, responses to questions Hunk asked him over the table. He and Lance had squabbled at first, but fell into ignoring each other. Pidge quickly became accustomed to always eating with Allura at her left, and Keith at her right. They all went on a mission or two, and despite some severe concerns about their success, they all made it through just fine. Though Allura still seemed slightly distressed by the situation, she was always casting meaningful looks in Pidge’s direction, her smile grateful. Pidge tried not to feel too accomplished.

She also quickly became used to a change in her late-night routine. Keith still stubbornly frequented the training bay in the wee hours of the morning, and so Pidge would go accompany him. They’d fight whatever bots he wanted to, argue when he inevitably wanted to try something more dangerous and, after a few nights of that, Pidge started inviting him back to her room post-training.

This became a habit—the fighting, coming back to her room, sitting on her bed and watching movies, or sometimes just sitting in silence. So when one night Keith skipped the training bay and came straight to her room, she was understandably surprised. From that point on, he started visiting more and training (a little) less.

She was loathe to break the status quo, but curiosity eventually got the better of her. One night while they sat together in her room, Keith lying back on her pillow with his feet hanging off the side of the bed, she asked while poking around on her tablet, “By the way, how’s the vibrator working out for you?”

He didn’t respond. His eyes were closed, but she knew he was awake, because his cheeks turned a pink hue. She repeated the question and he opened his glittering eyes, pointedly looking at the ceiling.

“I haven’t really used it,” he grumbled.

She raised her eyebrows, unable to determine if he was telling the truth. “Oh yeah? Why not? I thought we were gonna be human space dildo pioneers.”

“Don’t say—” Keith closed his eyes again, took in a deep breath, and covered his face with a hand. He sat up, glancing at her once before averting his eyes. “It’s just—it’s weird. Every time I think about using it, I see your face in my mind, and it’s too weird.”

“Really?” She frowned, furrowing her brow. “So you just go soft? I feel a little insulted.”

“That’s not what I—look,” he covered his face with both hands, eyes screwed shut, “if it were Hunk, that would be one thing, but with you, it’s just … different. Like you’ve got your eyes on me.”

She couldn’t help smirking. “That’s pretty gay, Keith, even for you.”

He lashed out and smacked her in the chest, eyes blazing, his face red all the way to his neck. She decided the color looked nice on him. “I’m serious. I feel like you’re watching me, all the time.”

“I watch everyone,” Pidge shrugged, evading the question. “Does it really bother you that much?”

He sat there in silence, searching her face, chest swelling with frustrated breaths. There was something he wanted to say, the words trapped behind the barrier of hesitation. She was beginning to tire of his perpetual state of guardedness.

She met his eye challengingly, declaring, “I think you like being watched.”

His pupils dilated. That could mean he was afraid, or perhaps interested. When he remained in place, mouth clamped shut, all signs began to point toward the latter. The hairs on Pidge’s neck stood on end, and everything in her vision narrowed to a point. She felt a sudden surge of temptation to push him to admit it, maybe suggest he go get the dildo right then and show her what he liked.

Before she could act on that whim, she casually splayed her hands and advised him, “Just try it out. I can’t watch you in your room, you know. There’s no camera—not even a thermal one. See?”

She pulled up the camera feed on her tablet and paged through all of the cameras, showing him directly so he could be sure she was telling the truth. His eyes followed the video feed but he still refused to respond. He merely crossed his arms tightly over his chest.

“Believe me, Keith, I’m just trying to help. I really am,” Pidge pleaded with a note of genuineness in her voice. “And we both agreed this might help you. If you’ve got any better ideas, I’m all ears.”

At that his face softened, taking on a slightly somber tint. “No, I don’t have any.”

She looked at him expectantly, eyebrows raised. He eventually sighed, “I’ll try. But if I don’t like it—”

“Then we’ll make it better,” Pidge finished for him. He shot her an unappreciative glare before morosely casting his eyes toward the far wall. He leaned back against her pillow again, rolling over onto his side like a petulant child.

Somehow, he seemed disappointed. Pidge wasn’t sure how to take that.

 

-

 

True to his word, Keith tried out the dildo a few times and reported back. The amount of feedback and detail that he provided were unprecedented. He did not give this information freely, but there was never a question he couldn’t answer clearly and with specific examples. When repeatedly prodded to do so.

When they finished the first data collection, Pidge sat back on her bed and scrolled through all the notes she’d taken on her tablet. She had several pages worth of information.

“What’s that look for?” Keith muttered from the other side of the bed, seated as far away as he could possibly get.

His eternally rotten mood couldn’t dampen her cheer. “Just thinking about how this is the type of qualitative dataset that a Ph.D student would kill to have. I told you, Keith, we’ll be pioneers.”

“Please stop joking about that,” he begged. “So, did that … help?”

“Yeah, this is great,” Pidge answered, feeling her excitement for the sciences renewed. “I’m surprised. You really pay close attention to your own body.”

His brow knotted in confusion. “Of course. I have to, so I can get stronger.”

Huh. Well, that actually made sense.

They continued this exchange of information for a couple of weeks, and then Pidge came out with Space Dildo 2.0, the embarrassment and resistance briefly returned, and the cycle started over again. Similarly, Keith’s behavior toward his other crewmates fluctuated in a circular fashion, where every time group dynamics acquired a new sense of normalcy, some unknown emotion would set him in a funk. He would stop talking to everyone for a few days, come back pieced together as a new, evolved emotional puzzle, and the struggle to reach him would start all over again. Lance was too proud to try to bridge the divide, and Hunk was unwilling to risk his precarious position to reach out any further than he already had.

And Shiro … Shiro was upset. Almost invisibly so, but Pidge could read him. How could he not be hurt? Where there had once been a friendship unlike any other on the ship, in its place was a transparent force-field—see-through, and yet impassable.

As for Keith and Pidge … she couldn’t say they had gotten any closer, but instead that they had finally noticed that, for a while now, they had thoroughly known each other without realizing. They were something abstract—not friends, but something more, and something less. At the very least, Pidge felt, Keith was the only other paladin that she could sit with in those inhospitable, primordial midnight hours and not suffer expectations. So they continued, and each pretended that the arrangement was normal.

Pidge collected data on Space Dildo 2.0 in several different sittings. This was her third round of questionnaires for this particular model, and she and Keith took up their normal positions in his room—he on his bed, arms crossed tightly, and her cross-legged on the floor. She asked all the same questions she always did, but once she got to a certain question on the list, she stopped. Something nagged at her. She paged back through the reports Keith had given up until that point, and compared the answers. She looked up at Keith, who was finding an extreme interest in some feature of the wall.

“From what you’ve told me, model 2.0 has improved from the first version,” she began slowly, scanning over his previous answers. “You’ve said that the shape is better for reaching the prostate, the girth fits in better, and that having multiple settings for vibration adds some variation.”

Keith’s head whipped toward her, eyes sharp. He snapped, “I know what I said, you don’t have to—”

“So by all means, if this model is better, you should be having an improved experience,” Pidge pushed on in spite of him. She raised an eyebrow and tapped on the question on her screen, reciting, “Question number thirty-three: ‘Have you found that the overall experience of using the device has improved?’ The last two times I’ve asked you, you have said no. If the dildo is better, then why hasn’t your experience improved?”

He opened his mouth briefly, but then quickly closed his mouth, eyes roaming everywhere but over toward her. While the bashfulness had been kind of endearing at first, Pidge was starting to get exasperated.

“Does it have to do with me? You’re still nervous about me having made it, or whatever?”

“No, I just—” He put a hand over his eyes and gritted his teeth. “Just give me a second.”

Sighing lightly through her nose, Pidge leaned her chin in her hand, idly surveying Keith’s room. Not a knick-knack or poster in sight. Not that there was much they could decorate their rooms with—especially not anything from Earth—but that didn’t mean they couldn’t try. After being in Lance’s room several times to hang out and play cards, and seeing all his weird alien pop-art holographic projections on the walls, seeing nothing here was strange.

She suddenly realized that it had been a long time since she had been in Lance’s room. She used to go there and hang with him once or twice a week. That must have been at least three weeks ago, maybe a month. Maybe more. She couldn’t really even remember the last time they had talked for more than a few minutes, without Hunk or someone else in the middle.

She remembered his hurt expression, his plaintive, ‘Are you here for me or not?’ A slow wave of agitation seeped into her chest. She wished there was a way for her to explain that this was her way of being there for him—of being there for everybody. Cleaning up the mess that no one else could put aside their own problems long enough to sort out. She was the youngest of them, and yet at times like this she felt a thousand years older. Ancient, but not wise.

“I think—” Keith started, making Pidge perk up and turn back toward him. “It just feels … impersonal.”

Pidge’s eyebrows furrowed. “What do you mean? I thought that was the point.”

Harried by her confusion, Keith gestured with both arms in patterns that he obviously meant to be illustrative, but from which Pidge could gather no meaning. He explained clumsily, “For me, it’s not—I don’t want to have sex just to have sex. Sometimes it’s also about being with a person. You know?”

A brief memory flashed through her mind, of Lance grinding above her, Hunk approaching him from behind. Yeah, she did know.

She rubbed a hand over her mouth. “That’s a hard thing to fix, considering your current shortage of eligible people to be with.”

“Don’t remind me,” Keith huffed out, scowling at the wall.

“You’re gonna have to talk to them eventually,” Pidge told him. “You know Lance is just messing with you. You could go talk with him and Hunk, and maybe set some ground rules. Just feel it out.”

He closed his eyes, face contorting in pain. “… I’ve tried doing that. It didn’t work.”

“Really?” Pidge’s eyes widened. She was almost impressed. “When was this?”

“A week ago. Shiro had been pushing me so much to just bury the hatchet, so … me, Hunk, and Lance all met in Hunk’s room one night to talk. When I left things felt worse than before.”

Pidge asked, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

He bit out defensively, “Because there was no point. If you had been there, you would understand. I said what I wanted, and I asked them about their expectations. Lance said he didn’t want Hunk fucking anyone else without him around, and I said I didn’t feel comfortable with that. And Hunk just—” Keith violently scrubbed a hand over his face. “Hunk just sat there. He didn’t say hardly anything. I know he couldn’t have known this would happen, but I feel like—like he lied to me, and now he’s just pretending it doesn’t involve him.”

Pidge got the keen sense that Lance was playing another of his games of cat and mouse with Keith. Only problem was, this wasn’t a game for Keith. That much was obvious.

“So then Hunk might be completely out of the question for the foreseeable future,” Pidge summarized for him. He nodded solemnly. She sat back on her hands and stretched her legs out, looking up toward the ceiling, thinking. A crazy thought came to her mind. “What about Shiro?”

His eyes flew wide open, and she could see from the way his chest decompressed that he had completely stopped breathing. He demanded in a low tone, “What _about_ Shiro?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know? Just saying he’s there? And he’s gay, and you two seem like good friends—”

“Aren’t you forgetting about his fiancée back on Earth?” Keith quickly interjected, cinching his arms even tighter over his chest. He tried his best to school his face back into the usual, morose picture, but a flicker of panic still flashed in his eyes. “I’m not going to ask Shiro for sexual favors while the dirt is still soft on his husband’s grave. Shiro isn’t _like_ that. He doesn’t just _sleep_ with people, and he definitely wouldn’t sleep with _me_.”

Pidge frowned at him, disbelieving. “Why not? You’re close, you’ve got trust, and you’re cute.”

“We’ve known each other for a long time, but that doesn’t mean—” He stopped, blinking in shock. He gave her a look that was a mixture of surprise and low-level terror. “You think I’m cute?”

Wait. Shit. She did just say that.

“Sure. For a boy,” she replied casually, averting her eyes. “You’ve got that androgynous, eighties punk vibe. There’s a lot of gay dudes who are totally into that.”

From the expression on Keith’s face, Pidge was pretty certain he had never heard the word “androgynous” in his life. Oh well—dumb boys did really well with gay dudes too.

She sighed, “Okay. So, then, Shiro’s out. What about Coran?”

Keith stared hard into the middle distance, mouth half-open, obviously undergoing some heavy contemplation. Pidge barked out a laugh that was a little too high-pitched and admonished, “Don’t actually consider it!”

“You asked me to,” Keith retorted heatedly.

“I wasn’t serious! No way was I gonna shack you up with Coran, of all people.”

He mumbled something about ‘not understanding what’s wrong with Coran,’ sinking down further onto the bed in embarrassment. Earnestness would get him some major points on the market, too.

“We’ll figure something out,” Pidge promised. “There’s gotta be something. Maybe you could consider banging some aliens.”

“Pidge,” Keith warned, thoroughly exhausted.

She simply repeated, “We’ll think of something.”

 

-

 

The answer to Keith’s dilemma came to Pidge far sooner than expected. Half a week later, she was gathering all her tools for the procedure—her laptop, her tablet, her electrical soldering equipment, her bag filled with an array of thin, wireless gadgets with names too long to say in a single breath. She was headed for the training bay. She would have to work in secret, but luckily she knew from spying on the surveillance cameras these past few months that there was a sweet spot of two or three hours in the late afternoon when nobody came to the training bay. Not even Keith.

As she made her way through the halls, she ran into Allura. Or perhaps the encounter wasn’t so accidental, since Allura greeted her with, “Pidge! I have been looking for you.”

“You have?” Pidge discreetly half-hid her collection of equipment at her side, but soon felt foolish for her nervousness. “Something you need?”

A bashful smile crossed Allura’s face. “No. Nothing I need …”

She tucked one loose, white strand of hair behind her pointed ear. Pidge suddenly realized she wasn’t currently wearing the front of her hair in its usual circlet. Instead, those two thick strands of hair framed her jaw in wavy rivulets. She met Pidge’s eyes with a bright intensity, as if challenging.

“I just wanted to say thank you. For whatever it is that you’ve done,” Allura continued, her lips genuine, soft, and … were they shimmering, or was that just Pidge’s imagination? “There are still difficulties among the other paladin’s relationships, but now Keith is participating again, and … that is your doing, isn’t it?”

“I guess so? Sort of,” Pidge replied, averting her eyes. She inwardly commanded herself not to think about the arrangement between her and Keith. Allura was pretty good at reading minds, and this was one thing she could never let Allura know about. “We just … talked about stuff, I guess. He’s still working things out with Lance and Hunk, but, yeah.”

“However it happened, I’m glad things are somewhat back to normal. You’ve done me a great favor, and eased my mind. I just … wanted to thank you for that,” Allura finished quietly, clasping one of Pidge’s hands in her own as naturally as if putting a period on a sentence. Her hand was smooth and cool, but warm at the same time.

Pidge exerted every ounce of self-control she could. This time, she couldn’t stop color from flying to her cheeks. And she knew Allura saw, from the way those blue eyes widened, the amethysts in her pupils glinting back.

“I’m glad you feel better, but you don’t have to thank me. You should thank Keith, for changing his mind. He’s been the one doing all the work,” Pidge rushed to explain, hoping that she hadn’t been too obvious.

Allura politely agreed, “I will be sure to thank him as well.” The brightness in her tone was a little too warm.

“Yeah, well, you do that. You can rest easy, now, Princess—or at least a little easier than before,” Pidge assured her blithely, extracting her hand from that firm but delicate grip. She sidestepped Allura and started walking briskly past her, saying, “Listen, I gotta go take care of some repairs, but I’m sure we can pick this up later. Have a good evening, Princess.”

She pretended not to hear Allura’s rejoinders, opting to keep pace all the way to the training bay. When she finally stopped, her face and neck were covered in a thin sheen of sweat, and she couldn’t tell if her heart was pounding from the exertion or the close call she had just narrowly avoided. She strode into the bay, thinking to herself that everything was fine. She came here to do a job, not to worry about what that conversation meant. She just had to do what she came here to do.

Within the Castle-ship’s systems, a special training mode existed where a bot could be deployed to act as a motionless dummy. This enabled the newest recruits to practice landing shots before going on to fight moving enemies. Individual, custom commands could also be given remotely in this mode, to simulate fighting patterns that soldiers encountered on the field that were not yet recorded in the ship’s systems. Pidge booted up this mode, watching as a training bot clambered out into the bay and waited silently for its commands. Then she got to work.

Several hours later, she was still working hard when she heard the bay door open. She froze, slowly turning around, only to sigh in relief when she saw Keith standing there. Of course he had to make an inopportune, unexpected appearance.

“What the hell are you doing?” Keith called out, always the charmer.

“What about you?” Pidge shot back, turning back to her work. She continued to poke her tools into the undercarriage of the training bot, rooting around for anything that seemed like nodes or wires to connect. “You usually only train at night. You trying to skip out on me?”

“No, I was just—” He stopped, drawing up behind her, and repeated as he looked over her shoulder, “What are you _doing_? Is it broken?”

“Just adding some upgrades. I guess it’s about ready for you to see. Give me just a second to connect one last node and … there.”

She removed her tools, closed the undercarriage with a snap, and stretched out her arms. She allowed herself the momentary satisfaction of a job well done. Keith gave her a suspicious look and asked, “What am I supposed to be seeing?”

“So, I think I solved your problem,” Pidge announced confidently. She stood up, reached under the bot and into the groin area, and flicked a switch there. Out from a newly-installed compartment popped Space Dildo 3.0, firmly attached to the area where the bot’s pelvis would be. This version was blue, ridged, and a vibrator, just like the others. “Cool, huh? Like a real person.”

She had expected embarrassment, maybe some squeaking, or some of the usual angry fare that came with Keith getting his shorts in a knot. What she didn’t expect was for him to practically backhand her, knocking her glasses straight off of her nose. They fell with a clatter onto the floor.

Holding her nose in shock, Pidge cried, “Hey!”

“These training bots aren’t _meant for this_ , Pidge,” Keith yelled at the top of his lungs. “Why did you think _this_ was what I meant when we talked earlier?”

Pidge retrieved her glasses, indignantly pushing them back onto her face. “We had a problem. You wanted to be with a person, but there were no people around you could be with. This is the closest thing to another person you can get. What’s the problem?”

For all the rage building up inside him, he seemed unable to explain why exactly the idea so appalled him. He covered his mouth with one hand and his chest with the other, trying to close himself off. He turned away and spat out, “Pidge—this is just, too weird. Training bots are for training _only_. We all use these, if I use one like this, I’m—and I would get caught.”

Oh. So that was it. Thankfully he was turned away so he couldn’t see her roll her eyes. “You’re not gonna get caught. Don’t you think I’ve installed some safeguards to prevent that?”

He paused in his frantic pacing, turning to look at her with poorly disguised curiosity. The expression on his face was absolutely helpless, and the tenseness in his frame gave away what he was trying to hide.

He asked, “… Safeguards?”

“Of course. Look,” she sighed, gesturing to the bot with one hand. “This bot’s in a special training mode that none of us ever use. And even if we did use it, the model I picked out has been in disuse for a while—it’s an older one, still in good shape, but not as advanced as the others, so it’s not the default choice. You’d have to go hunting for it. And even if you found it—”

She leaned in and fumbled for the switch between the bot’s legs again. With a flick of her finger the dildo made a nearly seamless retraction. “There’s a switch that activates the dildo, which also launches the adjusted programming. You’d _really_ have to get in there to turn this thing on, so if anybody _found_ it, they’d have to admit they were rooting around in a robot’s crotch with their hands.”

He was still far more incredulous than he had any right to be. He demanded, “And what if someone came in while I was using it?

She shrugged. “Beats me.”

She bade him to feel for the switch himself, so he could learn the position. When he refused, she moved his hand for him, letting him see how far back the switch resided. As soon as she released his hand he pulled back, averting his burning eyes.

“How could you even program a thing like this?” he demanded, desperately fighting back with every accusation in his arsenal.

She shrugged, “Well I haven’t fully programmed it _yet_. I’ve got a basic coding system running, but it needs a few tweaks before it can be run without my supervision. But once it’s done, you’ll be able to give it any commands you want.”

He squeaked, “ _Commands_?”

Groaning loudly, Pidge begged, “Please don’t make me spell everything out for you Keith. I know you’re smarter than that.”

“There’s no way I’m using this,” he protested, barring both arms across his chest, daring her with his eyes to fight him.

“Sure, yeah, you’re not gonna use it,” she acceded, bringing up the display on her tablet to continue working on coding. “Just make sure you continue not using it until I give you the go ahead, okay? Seriously, I don’t want you spraining anything. Oh yeah, also make sure you stretch yourself out in advance. This thing can’t self-lubricate.”

Predictably, Keith stormed out of the bay, his clomping footsteps audible from all the way down the hall. Honestly Pidge felt a little offended. They had encountered a huge problem in his sexual life, and she had offered a genius solution. Some compromises had to be made. What did he expect—for another sexually available male paladin to materialize on the ship?

“So ungrateful,” she muttered to herself as she typed in a few strings of code. Oh well. In the end this whole avoidant song and dance would pay off.

She knew him. Inevitably, Keith would come here, and flip the bot’s switch. And when he did, Pidge just might get to watch what happened afterward.


	5. Personal

That night while checking surveillance footage, she fell asleep without meaning to. And she dreamed that Allura came to pay her a visit. The door opened for her automatically, despite the fact that Pidge had locked it, and normally guests had to ask to be allowed in. Pidge sat up on her hands and watched Allura glide across the floor with an unearthly grace, perching herself on the edge of Pidge’s bed. Her eyes were downcast and her dark hands were clasped one over the other. Her nails were painted lavender, and the sight of them made Pidge shudder.

She spoke, but no sound came out of her mouth. No matter—the words set Pidge alight just the same and she reflexively pulled up her legs, cut through the middle by fear. Steely, yet white-hot at the same time. Allura immediately slithered between her legs, the train of her long dress draped in snowy folds off the side of the bed. Every nerve in Pidge’s body begged her to run away—reminding her that this was a dream, she had control, and she shouldn’t imagine this—but instead she leaned up into Allura’s body and kissed her waiting lips. They were so soft and warm, and the skin of her face beneath Pidge’s hands was even softer. Allura’s mouth opened and her tongue pushed in, tracing the line of Pidge’s teeth, and Pidge reached up to clutch at the white hair at the base of her skull. She felt Allura’s hips press firmly against hers, gently pinning her in place. She could feel the delicate pouch of Allura’s stomach pressing into the divots of her pelvis, sending heat curling through her middle.

At first Pidge was afraid to touch her more, deathly fearful of crossing yet another invisible line between them. But when Allura ran her hands up Pidge’s thighs, Pidge felt emboldened to feel along the planes of Allura’s stomach, up across her soft breasts. She squeezed them in both hands, eyes widening as Allura’s breath hitched, lace-like eyelashes fluttering. The warmth of her breasts made Pidge tingle all the way to the tip of her nose, and she wanted nothing more than to dive beneath that dress and directly feel the tender heat of her skin. Before she could try, however, Allura had gripped the hem of Pidge’s shirt and pulled it over her head, leaning in to kiss the exposed skin of her chest. Cool, dark hands slid up Pidge’s sides, those manicured thumbs brushing over her stiffening nipples.

Pidge bit her lip as those hands moved down, fingers dipping into the inside of her hips. Allura pulled her shorts down just enough to slide a hand into her underwear, feeling around with fingers much too sure for an alien who had no experience with human physiology. Of course, Pidge thought hysterically, this was a dream, a fantasy of her own making, and the brain’s primal instincts had no concern for the scientific. Her brief moment of clarity was interrupted by the chilly touch of fingertips against her labia, passing through the slickness there. They stroked up to her clitoris, circling the nub there, and her hips jerked when the pad of one of Allura’s fingers made direct contact.

“Shit,” Pidge blurted out. Instead of responding, Allura simply smiled at her. One wavy forelock of white hair hung over her shoulder, the ends tickling Pidge’s stomach.

Allura stroked her slowly, building her up, kissing all over her chest. Then her fingers moved lower, pressing teasingly at the opening to her vagina. Her manicured nails prodded gently, stroking back over the full line of Pidge’s crevice, then back down again, and this time Allura’s fingers slipped in enough that she could push further in. Pidge screwed her eyes shut as Allura pushed all the way inside, and she could feel the slide in the root of her spine. She felt Allura’s free hand grip her shoulder and opened her eyes to see Allura heatedly staring down at where her fingers disappeared inside of Pidge. That made Pidge clench around her. Allura glanced up at her, smiled again, and began to move. Slow at first, then harder, and fast.

Allura held Pidge in place as she fucked her, drawing out grunts and cut-off gasps for breath, the wet smack of her fingers unbearably loud in the deafening silence of the room. Pidge arched off the bed, hips bucking clumsily into her palm, feeling a sharp point of pleasure inside of her with every thrust. Allura’s fingers felt twice as long as they looked, striking deep with a force that Pidge would never have thought she’d like. She reached up and grasped Allura’s shoulder, desperately holding on, groaning helplessly as Allura switched up the rhythm of her thrusts. Her distinguished face was frighteningly beautiful as she looked at Pidge almost with admiration.

Pidge had wanted this so badly. The closeness, the warmth, the fixation. To know that maybe Allura meant something when she touched Pidge, in a way she didn’t mean with everyone else. Pidge squirmed on the bed, angling her body to get away from the pleasure as Allura drove in faster, harder, dragging out more embarrassing sounds. The heat built higher in Pidge’s abdomen, her passage swelling, Allura leaning over her to kiss her mouth.

And then, in the blink of an eye, the dream was gone. Pidge opened her eyes to the sound of a fervent buzzing near her head. She stared blearily at the ceiling, sucking in frantic breaths. She checked her shorts with a hand and found she had soaked through them. Her cheeks grew warm with excitement and shame. She turned over to find the source of the buzzing was her tablet, sending her an alert about abnormal activity on the ship. The alert seemed to be coming from the training bay, and Pidge shouldn’t have been surprised at what she saw when she switched to the bay’s surveillance footage, but she was. There was Keith, in high definition, standing in front of the training bot she had spent half the day working on. He had already shucked off his jeans and tossed them in a pile on the floor, leaving him clad in his t-shirt and black boxer briefs. And there was Space Dildo 3.0, protruding from the bot’s chassis, pointing its head accusatorily at Keith’s stomach.

Jesus fucking Christ. What did she tell him? She pushed the heels of her palms into her eyes and crawled off the bed, searching for her headset. When she found it, she connected it to the tablet and pulled down the microphone, and was about to speak when she thought better of it. If she chimed in now, he would likely get cold feet and run off again. Maybe she’d give him a minute—just boot up the coding program and keep an eye on him, to make sure he didn’t give the bot any commands it couldn’t handle and get himself crushed into a paste.

She manually adjusted the surveillance feed, zooming in and dragging the screen. When she got the camera where she wanted, centered directly over Keith and the bot, she saw him turn his back to the bot and push backwards against its pelvis. The dildo slid between his thighs, blue shaft sliding up the underside of his clothed balls. He closed his eyes and breathed in, and then opened his mouth to give the bot a command. The bot didn’t respond, prompting him to issue another one as he tried to figure out what phrase would trigger a response.

Pidge couldn’t hear him so she fiddled with the volume, and by the time his voice came out clearly he had already managed to give the bot an instruction it recognized. It placed both hands on his hips and began to slowly thrust between his legs. His pink mouth fell open, brows furrowing as he watched the bot’s dick pass between his creamy thighs. Pidge had figured he might have more scars on his legs from all his time fighting, or rolling around in the mud tussling with other guys, or whatever jocks did with their spare time at the Garrison. Instead he seemed almost completely smooth from the waist down, except for some light scars on his knobby knees.

He leaned back against the bot, letting it take most of his weight, and watched the dildo fuck between his clenched thighs. The bot’s motions made his hips rock in time, the muscles of his abdomen flexing beneath the hem of his shirt. The blue head pushed past the soft skin, shaft gliding up to brush the swell in his briefs and—were his thighs wet? Had Keith lubed up his legs for this?

“Jesus,” Pidge swore in admiration, then panicked, checking to see if the mic was on. It wasn’t, and Keith, none the wiser, continued to suck in quiet breaths through his parted lips as he watched the dildo breach the seam of his legs.

He reached back, gripped the bot’s shoulders with his gloved hands and groaned, “Harder.”

The issue with the bot’s programming was that it was still too rudimentary to easily differentiate between two discrete actions. When Keith gave the instruction, he likely meant he wanted the bot to thrust harder. But the bot, not knowing this, strengthened both its grip and its thrusts. This was one of the issues Pidge had been referring to when she warned Keith earlier. She could see the bot’s fingers digging harshly into the pale flesh of Keith’s hips, into the concavities of the bone, in a way she knew would bruise later. He didn’t seem to care. In fact, he let out a startled moan—a sweet noise that sounded nothing like him—and swelled further in his briefs.

He ordered the bot to stop just long enough to pull his briefs down to his knees. The black cloth slid away to reveal that his cock was completely stiff with need, the head burning with a muted, needy red hue. When he commanded the bot to start thrusting again Pidge could actually see this time how the shaft pushed through the gap of skin between his balls, which already glistened with sweat. He shuddered, arching his hips to get a better angle, color blooming in his cheeks.

“ _Jesus_ ,” she swore again, feeling the heat from her dream return. Where had _this_ Keith been all this time? She could hardly recognize him. The one thing she did recognize was the surly glint in his eyes, still filled with embarrassed heat, and his body taut with sharp tension.

But wow, he was enjoying this. Despite the way he turned his head away in shame, biting his lip, he still held tightly onto the bots shoulders and moved his hips in time. His nipples stiffened deliciously against the fabric of his shirt.

She knew she should say something. She needed to stop him, before he was too far gone, and got into operations that the bot couldn’t handle. Before he made requests it couldn’t safely fulfill. But how could she? This was a side of Keith that only Hunk had seen so far, and it was … Jesus, it was something.

After a few more moments of indulging in the slick slide of the bot’s cock, Keith told it to stop again and, before Pidge realized what he was doing, had positioned himself to take it inside, pushing back with his hips. Pidge dove to open a new window, activating the camera she had installed in the bot’s head for just such an occasion. The feed switched on and she typed in a prompt for the bot to pan its head down. She got a first-row view of the textured dildo sinking deep inside Keith, rib by rib, all the way to the base. He gave a muffled moan, legs shaking, his briefs still cinching his knees. A wet sheen glistened on the taut rim of his entrance, trailing down the back of his thighs.

Goddamn, he had _actually_ stretched himself. She didn’t know which was more arousing, the fact that he was so earnestly using the toy she had created for him, or that he had actually _listened_ to her.

She didn’t wait for Keith to tell the bot to continue. She keyed in a command prompt and the bot began to thrust, drawing a startled—but not entirely displeased—sound from Keith’s throat. The bot had an iron grip on his hips, bending him at an awkward angle, and he reached backward to desperately grasp onto whatever he could to stabilize himself. He bit his lip, moans coming out in muffled spurts, body jerking with each slow, hard stroke. His arms trembled weakly, and on the other camera she saw his eyelashes flutter and his mouth fall open, showing a flash of that pink tongue.

He tried to straighten up a bit, pale neck arching in pleasure. His hazy eyes cast a sightless glance toward the far wall. He ordered in a voice much tougher than he currently appeared, “Choke me.”

Alright, well. This might have finally started getting out of hand. Pidge rushed to make sure the bot didn’t run any programs in response, and unmuted her microphone.

“Uh, Keith?” she hesitantly ventured. Her voice rang out from the small speaker installed in the bot’s chassis. Immediately she saw horror wash Keith’s face pale. “What did I tell you about giving this thing complicated commands?”

“Oh God, how long have you been—” Keith groaned hysterically, his words cut off by another thrust that turned his mortification into a sound of reluctant pleasure.

“Just a few seconds,” Pidge lied, leaning in closer to the display with her hand pressed to her mouth. She watched in fascination as the bot’s cock dragged against his hole, beads of lube sluicing through the valleys of each rib. “Got, uh—got an alarm on my tablet that someone was messing with the bot. Needed to make sure nobody had, uh, discovered its new, uh, features.”

She had never seen him so humiliated. He burned from his cheeks, to the tips of his ears, all the way down his neck and shoulders. He wheezed, “I can’t believe this—I can’t—” He placed both palms on the bot’s abdomen, trying to push it away. “Let go of me.”

When that prompt appeared in the coding of the bot’s program window, Pidge ended the process with a flick of her finger against the screen. The bot thrust mindlessly into Keith again, drawing out a pained cry. He glared daggers over his shoulder, almost meeting Pidge’s gaze in the visual feed, but not quite. “Pidge—”

“Telling the bot to choke you is, uh, a little outside its range of safely-performable commands. But I could, uh—y’know. Do it for you.” When his eyes widened in response, she quickly clarified, “Make the bot choke you, I mean. Its AI isn’t good enough to do that on its own, but under supervision? No problem. If that’s, what you want.”

His breaths suddenly grew ragged in his throat. He hesitated, only to receive another rough thrust from behind. He moaned and hung his head, replying desperately, “You know how I feel about this. I can’t—not when you’re—”

Pidge’s gaze shifted to Keith’s dick and she saw that despite his protests, his erection hadn’t flagged in the slightest. In fact, she saw precome beading at the head, slipping along the length of his already-damp cock. She wondered idly if he was a shooter.

“Is there, like … a _reason_ you don’t want me to watch?” Pidge asked him. “I mean, I get that you’re a private person, but I’m not gonna be jacking it to you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I don’t even— _haa_ ,” he gasped plaintively, hips jerking forward with another firm stroke of the bot’s dick. His knees shook so weakly she thought they might go out. With renewed frustration, he finished in an accusatory tone, “Why the fuck do you have to watch?”

She opened her mouth and closed it again. The question incensed her more than she thought it would. “Do you _really_ want to know that?”

Still straining against the bot’s hold, he replied “Yes,” but it slid out in an unintentional moan.

“Because I like to,” Pidge shot back, not entirely in control of what she was saying. She quickly added, “And fortunately for me, you haven’t gone soft yet, so you must not hate the idea that much.”

He gritted his teeth and groaned miserably, thighs flexing with tension. The fluorescent bay lights glanced off the wet rivulets running down his legs as the bot mindlessly thrusted into him. Their reflection momentarily drew her eye. He wasn’t saying anything, but Pidge still felt unspoken words in the air.

She told him, “This is exactly the kind of shit you tell me about on a regular basis. I’m not dumb. I know you’re game for this. So what are you afraid of?”

“This is way different than—”

He clenched his jaw and groaned, and Pidge decided to do him the favor of briefly bringing the bot’s movements to a halt. His head hung forward, harsh breaths wheezing out of his lungs, his face hidden on all cameras by sweat-dampened black hair. She could see the rim of his entrance clench around the dildo, and another wave of heat seeped into her hips.

“You’re going to laugh at me,” he ground out, in the tone of a wounded animal. “You’re going to think I’m weird. I know you already do.”

Immediately, Pidge retorted, “Of course you’re weird, but you’re weird about other stuff. This is normal. And I’m not gonna laugh at you. No one who could see you right now would ever think of laughing at you.”

“What does that—”

Pidge commanded the bot to start thrusting again, cutting off his words. He instinctively rose onto his toes, leg muscles straining, back arching slightly with each firm stroke. Pidge manually adjusted the angle of the bot’s hips until Keith confirmed she’d found the sweet spot with a startled shout. Now each cry was higher-pitched, almost a low whimpering, which he tried to stifle by biting his lower lip.

She watched the bot press into him over and over, covering her mouth with her hand just in case the mic could pick up her breathing. Her steely eyes darted between both surveillance cameras, from the elastic stretch of his wet rim, to the pink flush on his cheeks and neck, his cock heavy and dripping. Faintly red and yellow splotches had started to bloom on his hips beneath the bot’s fingers. His eyebrows were knitted together, eyes scrunched tight. Still fighting back, but that was okay. Pidge liked it when he fought her.

She zoomed in on both feeds, ogling him freely. She murmured in a somewhat husky tone, “Damn.”

He bristled and threw an accusatory glance over his shoulder. The bite of it was muted by the misty haze in his stare. “What?”

She leaned forward and began mapping out a more complicated command—a mixture of coding and manual path-drawing on another new program she opened on her tablet. “Nothing. Just, your ass is really toned, huh? Guess all that training has fringe benefits.”

She thought it was impossible for his face to get any warmer, but he grew a shade even redder than it already was. “Pidge—”

The bot pulled out of him and pushed him to his knees. He caught himself on his palms and had whipped around to growl something angrily at Pidge when the bot knelt down and spread his legs wide. This brought his hips so close to the ground that the tip of his erection flirted with the cold floor. The bot cinched his waist in a tight grip again and plunged roughly back in, making him jerk with the impact. He gave a cut-off cry, eyes flying wide open for a moment. His feet scrabbled vainly for purchase on the slick ground and he bit back sounds of pleasure so hard that his bottom lip disappeared beneath his teeth.

“If you don’t like this, just snap your fingers three times and I’ll stop,” Pidge told him. Before he had a chance to ask any questions, she instructed the bot to reach out and, with the aid of extremely careful and precise strings of code, it curled its smooth, jointed fingers around his neck and mashed his cheek down into the white floor. The bot’s grip tightened, restricting his airflow, and Pidge saw his mouth open and his pupils dilate wide. Another thrust shook his lithe frame and he winced, a strangled groan falling weakly from his pink mouth, which seemed perfectly sized to fit a warm cock in a way that Pidge had never realized before. He could barely get out a sound, despite desperately trying to form words, and she found that she rather liked him at a loss for words. She licked her lips.

“I know you like being watched. But more than that, you like being pushed around a little,” she told him confidently.

She increased the intensity of the bot’s thrusts while slowing down the speed just a little, letting the dildo drew all the way out rib by rib before driving back in. Keith gasped and writhed, clutching wildly at the hand on his neck. Though a vein in his arm strained, the bot’s grip didn’t even budge.

“That’s because you’re such a glutton for punishment. Stuff you do on the battlefield carries over, you know?” she continued, carefully treading the line between teasing and making fun. “You’re all anti-authority, and anti-Garrison, but I bet when nobody’s looking you get off on being told what to do. Bet you’ve thought about being on your knees in front of your commanding officer. Bet you wanted someone to make you say ‘yes, sir.’”

“ _Pidge_ ,” he hissed out, paying for the attempt with a quickened pace of thrusts. His free hand clenched against the ground and he screwed his eyes shut, sucking in sharp, frantic breaths.

“I’m right, though,” Pidge responded, “aren’t I?”

He growled out a string of words that was mostly incoherent, but Pidge got the gist. She smiled wanly and gradually increased the bot’s force until its cock pistoned into Keith with a force that made every muscle shudder. Keith’s mouth hung open and his stifled cries grew desperate, moisture trickling down the line of his lower eyelid and onto the floor. Pidge had never seen him so open, getting fucked so hard he was unable to make more than a few weak sounds. She looked to the feed from the bot’s perspective, watching the milky expanse of Keith’s back expand and contract, watching the carved lines of his bones undulate beneath his skin, and she could almost imagine what it would be like to have him under her. She could feel her own wetness through her underwear

Against her better judgment, she asked him heatedly, “You kneel for Hunk, don’t you? You spread your legs, take his cock hard and deep, and you _thank_ him for it. I know you do.”

He gave a gurgling moan, struggling to close his legs enough to raise up into a more grounded position, but the bot held him down, ruthlessly slamming into his hips. The plaintive notes in his straining voice made Pidge burn from the waist down and she quickly commanded the bot to close its other hand around his erection, letting him thrust into its metal fist. She then muted her microphone and nearly tore off her headset in her haste to pull down her shorts. She balanced herself on one arm and pressed two fingers to her clit, hissing in relief.

She turned to watch Keith as he bucked into the bot’s hand, his eyes nearly rolled up into his head. The bot’s cock slammed into him until his legs trembled and she saw his whole body tense. Pidge stroked her clit in circles as she watched him come hard with a sobbing moan, shooting come all over the ground in thick white ropes. The bot fucked him through it until he looked and sounded like an inconsolable mess, and then Pidge was coming too, hips jerking firmly against her hand. She quickly reached over and tapped out a command for the bot to stop thrusting and release Keith’s neck. His chest heaved with a lungful of fresh air and he coughed, knees shaking hopelessly. After a few seconds of shuddering, he managed to push himself up enough to slide off the bot’s cock, wincing as he did so. A thin string of glistening semen dripped from the tip of his dick, connecting it to the floor. A lingering wisp of arousal curled through Pidge’s middle.

She steadied her breathing, put on the headset, and unmuted the microphone. “Damn. That was … damn.”

All Keith could do was huff out a few whistling breaths through his mouth. He struggled into a sitting position, unable to rest fully on his backside. He glanced at the bot’s face and Pidge saw those dark eyes flash as if he saw right through to her on the other side. He quickly looked away.

“I’ll come bring you some towels,” Pidge offered.

He grimaced and stumbled to his feet. Face still burning, he grabbed up his briefs and clumsily put his legs through the holes. He said nothing.

Pidge added, “I can grab you a change of clothes, too,” and hopped off her bed to fetch something from her drawers. He was a lot taller than her, but she was sure her clothes would still fit.

“No!” Keith bit back so loudly she could hear some feedback. She took a peek at the tablet where she left it on the bed and saw that he had already mostly squirreled into his tight black jeans. “Didn’t you already get what you wanted?”

“It’s called ‘bedside manner,’ Keith,” Pidge retorted incredulously. She gathered up her long t-shirt and some cargo pants for him, just in case. She told him derisively, “You’ve ruined those pants. You know that, right? This is why I said I’d bring a towel—”

“You _laughed_ at me!” Keith blurted out in accusation. He was halfway through pulling his shirt over his head. He made a lunge for the bot and pushed it backward angrily, glaring directly at her. “You said you wouldn’t _laugh_!”

“When did I _laugh_?” she asked in exasperation, leaning over the tablet to watch the anger on his face shift through an ugly, pink kaleidoscope of humiliation, self-hatred, and the barest hint of excitement.

“All that shit that you said—about me, and the Garrison, and being on my knees—” His breath hitched and he covered his mouth, turning away from her. His shirt was rucked up above his lower back, the dip in his spine slightly visible. “You actually _thought_ I did all those things!”

“That was dirty-talk, Keith,” Pidge appealed to him. When he still didn’t turn around she clapped a hand over her face and wiped the sweat away from her forehead, insisting, “I don’t know if you did that or not. I just thought it sounded hot.”

He stared over his shoulder at her. He had that look on his face again, wounded and mistrustful, filled with resentment. She was getting tired of seeing him upset. Sex wasn’t supposed to be upsetting. Relationships weren’t supposed to be upsetting.

She spoke before she could stop herself. “Can’t you just let yourself have fun for once? No one’s here but us. No one’s laughing.”

He turned away, hand still covering his mouth. While he stood there in confliction, she ordered, “Don’t move. I’m getting the towels, and then I’ll be right there.”

She threw down her headset, scooped up her tablet, and practically flew down the hallway to the shower room. She was fairly confident that Keith would bolt before she could get there, so she rushed to grab some clean towels. She couldn’t resist making a pit-stop for a much-needed pee, though. She could never tell him she had masturbated to watching him get fucked. A little white lie by omission never hurt anybody.

When she made it to the training bay, she was surprised to see him still standing there, frozen in the same position. He refused to look at her until she held out one towel and the spare change of clothes right in front of him. His eyes were suddenly … warm. Vulnerable.

“Change into these. They’re clean,” she told him.

He hesitated, then warily accepted her offering. “You have to turn around.”

Pidge groaned, but acceded nonetheless. She heard shifting of cloth behind her, and when she turned back around, she found that he fit in her clothes rather well. The cargo pants were more like shorts on him, and her long-sleeved shirt topped out at his elbows, but hey, he was covered. And clean.

They mopped Keith’s mess off the floor and flicked the switch on the bot’s crotch, sending it back from where it came. “I’ll clean that later,” Pidge said noncommittally, but Keith didn’t seem to be paying attention. He was off in his own world, staring blankly at his surroundings.

She led him back to his room and sat him down on his bed. Now that he was back in his element, he livened up a bit. Just enough for a dash of frustration to pinch some lines into his face.

Pidge started over for the bed, but then thought better of it and sat on the floor across from him. “You okay?”

He nodded, looking away.

“Did you enjoy that?” Again, another nod. “Is that what you were looking for, when you said you wanted something less impersonal?”

“Not something _quite_ like that,” he breathed out tersely, ears growing pink.

She pressed, “But it worked? The bot idea worked?”

He nodded a third time and Pidge felt a tight fist relax in her chest. She let out a huge sigh of relief. “That’s good to hear. See? We made it better. We made it work.”

“Is this …” He stopped, swallowed, and opened his mouth again, still averting his gaze. “Is this going to happen again?”

She leaned back on her hands and searched his face. “Yeah. If you want to use the bot again.”

“Just like tonight? With you—watching?”

She certainly hoped so. She tried to appear casual, shrugging, “Yeah. Until I get the kinks worked out of its programming so that you can run it autonomously.”

His expression grew stony, and somewhat somber. “So eventually you won’t need to watch anymore.”

“Right. But I can do whatever you want me to do.”

Keith’s eyes met hers—nervous, cautious, and confused. She was letting her mouth get away from her again. She stood up and gave him a gentle punch in the arm. He flinched and raised an eyebrow at her, vexed. She advised him, “Next time you want to play with the bot, just come to me first, okay? You don’t have to feel bad.”

She felt an acute sense of déjà vu. The words felt familiar somehow. Keith gave no response, and she knew the time for platitudes had ended. She left the room, taking one last peek at him before she walked out.


	6. Strings

Pidge spent most of the next day in a fog. She and Coran squirreled themselves away in various nooks and crannies of the Castleship, attempting to finally solve the problem with the comms once and for all. They had called on Hunk for additional help, but he said he was “already busy.” With what, neither of them knew. There was jack-all to do out in the void of space other than some technical maintenance. But it turned out fine. Pidge actually liked hanging out with Coran by themselves sometimes. He always had something interesting to talk about, and his stories were completely bananas. She learned more about Altean tech by hearing him talk than she ever did working hands-on in the ship’s guts.

As Pidge soldered together weird alien tech bits that she still didn’t quite understand, she remarked idly to Coran, “You know, I’d love to take apart whatever crazy supercomputing thing runs the steering module in the cockpit. I’m sure there’s a ton of planets that could use that kind of technology.”

He sat beside her, spraying some kind of weird fluid over the bits intermittently. He had tried to explain what this liquid was for, but she never quite understood. “I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time for that after we save the universe. Allura’s planning to keep you on, after all.”

She shot him a surprised look. The effect was lost since her eyes were covered with safety goggles. She hoped they also hid the fire in her cheeks. “She never said anything about that to me. What if I want to go back to Earth after this is over?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll visit them plenty!” Coran assured her, waving his hand as if to dispel the notion. “Space travel has become so sophisticated that with the right equipment, you can cross eons in a second. There’s this one amazing device I’ve been hoping we can rebuild someday, called the teludav—”

“Done,” Pidge interrupted, lifting up her goggles. She gestured to him to hand over her laptop and she ran a test of the communications system by calling the room they were in. She spoke over the intercom, and while the sound echoed with pitchy feedback, it worked. “Finally. Only took working on thirty different terminals.”

“Yes! I thought we were going to have to fix all one hundred and twenty-eight of them. What a close one, right?” Coran borrowed Pidge’s headset and sent a message blaring out to every single room on the ship, shouting victoriously, “Hey, everyone! The comms are fixed—I repeat, the comms are fixed! Woohoo!”

They put up their tools and carried them out toward the common room, where they parted ways. Pidge headed back to her room, intending to eat and crash for a little while. Today she just felt completely drained, though hanging out with Coran was a good pick-me-up.

As she neared her room she passed Shiro in the hall. He stopped her and said, “I hear we have you to thank for patching things up.”

She shrugged, giving him her cockiest smirk. “Well, not just me. Coran helped me fix the comms terminals all day today, though I did a lot of the work, so—”

“No, not that,” Shiro interjected with a strange expression. He seemed halfway caught between a friendly smile and unnerved suspicion. “The—the thing with Keith.”

“Uh,” she replied intelligently. Images of Keith and his spread legs from the previous night flashed through her head. “Last time I heard the ‘thing with Keith’ wasn’t fixed. What happened?”

A stream of relief seemed to flow through him. “If you haven’t heard, then don’t worry about it. I’ll see you around.”

And there he went, around the corner and out of sight. As cryptic as ever. As much as Pidge cared about Shiro, she could see why Keith could get so annoyed with him.

She dropped her tools off at her room and headed for the kitchen. There she found Hunk, humming away cheerfully, currently turning a batch of food goop into something more edible. He bounced around the room from a tray and bowl on the counter to the food dispensary, liberally mixing and mashing and kneading with light steps. When he saw her he greeted her with a loud “Hey!”

“Hey?” she hedged, leaning on the door frame. “What’s with all the excitement?”

“Oh, you know,” he shrugged with a huge, goofy smile. No, she did not know.

She asked, “Does this have to do with the Keith thing?”

“It’s just such a weight off my shoulders, man,” Hunk answered giddily. He wrapped her in a brief hug that nearly crushed her lungs. “You want food? I’ll make you something special. Just wait at the table.”

She cradled her bruised ribs as she shuffled out to the dining room. There, sitting alone at the table, was Lance. She saw him from behind first, and then he turned to look at her. He quickly looked away. Sighing to herself, Pidge sat in the chair across from him. He stared down at the table, picking at his fingers.

“So,” she began hesitantly. “The ‘Keith thing’ is fixed? How did that happen?”

His head shot up so fast that his neck cracked and he clutched it, whining, “Ow.” He soon regained his composure and demanded, “What do you mean? He said he talked things out with you.”

Pidge blinked owlishly at him. “Keith did? Wait, you talked with him about—all this, again?”

His jaw dropped in disbelief. “Uh, yeah! Today he came by and talked to me and Hunk. Said he wasn’t mad anymore, because you guys had a talk, and he knows what to do now. He’s been acting like normal ever since. He actually talks to me now, without getting mad at me.”

“Oh.” Pidge felt baffled herself. She tried to imagine straight-laced Keith, confronting Lance and Hunk and washing his hands of both of them just like that. She never would have thought he’d have the composure. “Wow. Well, good, I guess.”

“No, _not_ good,” Lance whined further, dropping his head into his hands. “You ruined my opening! He said that now he doesn’t _need_ Hunk anymore, so I don’t have to share. Who can pass up _Hunk_? You ruined everything!”

Pidge raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m pretty sure me ruining your opening is way less bad than getting the cold shoulder from the iciest dude in space for the rest of your life.”

“I _guess_ ,” Lance huffed, leaning his chin on his hand. He looked down at the table again, his delicate lashes hiding his eyes. He grumbled angrily, “I bet you fucked him.”

A puff of laughter burst out of Pidge’s mouth. At first Lance glared up at her, but when he saw she wasn’t mocking him, he lowered his lashes again and pouted.

“We haven’t talked in like, weeks,” he muttered. “And now we’re just talking about Keith again.”

She rubbed her neck bashfully. “Yeah. Look—I’m sorry. About not being there for you. I just promised Hunk that I wouldn’t invade his and Keith’s privacy, and I knew if I talked to you, you’d spill the beans.”

He glared daggers at her again, sitting up and crossing his arms defiantly over his chest. “So it’s my fault.”

“No—It’s definitely not your fault,” she jumped to assure him. “I really am sorry. But I know everything now, about the whole situation, because Keith told me. So from here on out, if you need to talk about any of this, I’m here for you.”

She held out her hand across the table in a gesture of peace. Lance was initially skeptical, an expression of hurt still contorting his face, but eventually he reached out and shook her hand. He still seemed sad, and worried, but happy, too. A lot happier than she had seen him in a while.

“Okay. But I’m only forgiving you because you helped sort this out. Except now he’s not gonna fuck Hunk at _all_ , so I’ve completely lost my in!”

“Guess you’re gonna have to actually—” Pidge gasped in mock horror, covering her mouth, “admit you’re _into him_.”

“No way,” Lance shot back, face screwing up in disgust. “I’ll think of something else. And you better _help_ me this time.”

“Sure, sure,” Pidge consented. She paused, thinking to herself for a moment. “What was Shiro’s deal? He was all … weird about this.”

“Dude, we all thought you were fucking Keith,” Lance told her again. He squinted at her in suspicion. “I still say you are. Are you?”

“I’m not fucking Keith,” Pidge replied honestly. At least, not _technically_ , anyway. Though, that made Shiro’s reaction make more sense. What had Keith said about the “dirt cooling on his husband’s grave?” She shook her head. Dumb fucking boys.

So she guessed that Keith must have talked to Shiro, too. Seemed like he had talked to everyone but her today. She wondered how long she would have to wait before he’d face her again. The thought made her a little disappointed. Just a skosh.

She didn’t have long to think about it before Hunk was whirling out of the kitchen with the first tray of food he’d managed to conjure up from the dregs of their usual gross green meals. They looked like little emerald buns of jello, partially see-through. The texture was strangely burnt, and when Pidge took a bite, green goop squished out onto her hand. Still, it was a lot more bearable than regular food goop. It wasn’t perfect, but then again, nothing was.

 

-

 

Keith eluded Pidge all day along. She actually actively went looking for him, but no matter how hard she searched, she couldn’t seem to locate him. Maybe he was in his room—she knocked on the door several times, but no answer. Not like he’d open the door for her anyway, even if he _was_ in there.

Once she retired to her room for the night, she peeled off her pants and set up her tablet for her usual nighttime routine. Maybe she’d catch the walking ‘80s rerun hitting up the training bay for some late-night sparring. Over the next few hours she drifted in and out of sleep, lazily keeping an eye on the surveillance footage. Normally she had no problem staying awake and over-energized. She guessed that all the late nights of hanging out recently must have tired her out.

She woke with a start to a knock on the door. Disoriented, she sat up, pausing to see if she had dreamed it. Another set of three rapid knocks came on the door, and she recognized their cadence.

“Come in,” she said, seized by suspense. And sure enough, in came Keith, who stood awkwardly near the entrance and shifted his gaze about the room. The door slid shut behind him. “What’s up?”

“I—” he started, licking his lips, “I came to talk.”

He was dressed in his usual dark jeans and t-shirt, but his bomber jacket was conspicuously absent. In one hand he carried the clothes Pidge had loaned him, and in his other, an object she couldn’t see because he held it behind his back. As he came closer to hand back her belongings, she saw that he was toting a small bag.

She tossed her clothes on the floor and gestured with one hand to the bag. “What’cha got there?”

He was almost thrumming with agitation, shoulders shuddering with minute tremors. He opened and closed his mouth, then simply handed her the bag. The shape felt familiar, and when she opened it up, she found Space Dildo 2.0, along with her personal hand-crafted tube of lubricant. She held the purple dildo in her hand, feeling along the textured waves she had carved into the side with a special tool. This one was a lot thicker than Dildo 1.0. Keith really wanted the stretch.

Confused, she smirked at him and asked teasingly, “Come for more data collection? I thought you preferred the bot.”

“You—you said—” He dare to take a glance at her face but couldn’t maintain eye contact. His cheeks flared scarlet. “After the training bay, with the robot, you were saying—I should—come to you first next time. Isn’t this—what you meant?”

Pidge mouthed an “oh” out of shock. No, this was absolutely not what she had meant, but the lower half of her body began to throb just thinking of the implications. She noticed again with dizzy surprise that he had left his jacket in his room.

“Maybe I read you wrong,” Keith breathed out in a panic. He scrubbed a hand over his face, angling away from her. “But I thought you said—I should—”

“Keith,” she told him firmly. His spine jerked straight as a streetlight and he looked at her over his shoulder. The depths of his dark eyes smoldered with desire. She scooted over on her bed and patted the bed with a hand. “You want me to watch you, right? I want to see how you use the dildo I made for you.”

He clumsily pried himself out of his boots and socks with such a lack of his usual finesse that Pidge almost couldn’t restrain herself from laughing. When his hands went to the hem of his shirt she held out a hand and said, “Wait. Leave the rest on for now.”

He carefully climbed onto the bed across from her, balanced on his knees. He stared at her expectantly with an intensity he usually only reserved for perilous battles. She could already see him straining against the seam of his tight jeans.

“Touch yourself,” she ordered him. More color burned high in his cheeks. He reached for his dick and she corrected, “Not yet. Nipples first. Through the shirt.”

She heard him draw in a sharp breath of air. “Pidge—”

“Do you want the full experience?” Pidge asked him. He narrowed his eyes warily. “Then nips first. You’ve played with them before anyway, right?”

“No!” he squeaked, though she knew he was lying.

She clapped her hands together and gave him the most sincere expression she could muster. “You’re gonna dig it, trust me.”

He cursed lowly and closed his eyes, reaching up with trembling arms to his chest. With one hesitant stroke he circled two spots on his chest, and then again, until Pidge could see his nipples slowly protrude through the fabric of his shirt. She’d already seen this once, but it was even hotter the second time, with him stroking himself this close to her. He pinched the buds and rolled them between his fingers slowly, letting out a shaky sigh.

He released them and put a hand over his eyes in embarrassment. “I can’t. I can’t.”

“You can,” she insisted. “Now, go under the shirt this time.”

He grimaced, nostrils flaring, but she was unimpressed. She motioned with her fingers for him to get started and he reluctantly pulled up the hem of his shirt, the glimmer in his eyes growing brighter with each inch of bare skin that was revealed. The dull lights of Pidge’s room cast shadows in the crevices of the smooth curves of his abdomen. He stopped at his ribs, just below the pectorals.

Her cone of vision withdrew to a point, concentrated on the flesh still hidden beneath the cloth. “All the way up. I want to see you do it.”

Another hitch of breath from him and he pulled the shirt all the way up, exposing the firm, flat contour of his chest, his nipples two stiff brown-and-pink dots on his chest. He muttered to himself barely loud enough for her to hear, “I can’t do this, I can’t do this, this is stupid,” but stroked his fingers over the nubs anyway. He inhaled sharply, grunting, and again rolled them. He hunched inward, groaning desperately, and stalled for a few moments until Pidge urged him on again. She studied him more intently than she ever had any cosmic phenomena, her hand to her chin, as he pinched and rubbed until he looked like he would die of humiliation.

She reached out and pressed her palm to the inseam of his jeans. His hips bucked upward and she felt the warm swell of his clothed erection glide roughly over her palm. He moaned in surprise and thrust upward again, falling forward to lean on his arms. He met her gaze with panic, confusion, like he was doing something he knew he shouldn’t be.

The back of Pidge’s neck felt electrified, every hair standing on end. She could feel his thighs trembling around her hand.

“Go ahead,” she told him.

Slowly, hesitantly, he began to move. He rubbed himself against her palm, the entire length of his cock straining to meet her. His head hung, still in shame, but now weakening with burning want. The motion of his hips as he rutted into her hand entranced Pidge. So clumsy, and yet so desperate, grinding hard as he bit his lip to quiet his moans. Far away in the back of her mind a logical voice reprimanded her. This was probably not a great idea.

She pulled her hand away and instructed him, “Take off your clothes.” As Keith hastened to wriggle out of his shirt and pants, she took the lube from the bag and handed it to him. When he accepted it, he had one foot still in one pant leg, his black briefs clinging tantalizingly to his swollen member. His pupils dilated again with a yearning that Pidge felt drip into her stomach.

“Stretch yourself.”

His adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. Without another word he stripped out of his briefs, letting his heavy, pink cock sway. He swallowed again. “H-how should I—”

She couldn’t help but smile, feeling more sticky-sweet pleasure seep into her groin. She loved it when he took orders. “On your back.”

He obediently laid back on the bed, his knobby knees askew at impractical, awkward angles. There was barely enough room for him, his long legs, and Pidge all on the same bed. By the time he got himself in a comfortable enough position, Pidge was close enough to see the faint pucker of his entrance. She reached over and squeezed one of his legs, thumb digging into the tough, sinewy material. She relished the new surge of anxiousness that flared up in his expression.

He popped the cap off the lubricant and squeezed a liberal amount onto two of his fingers. After capping it again he ran his hand down the front of his body, screwed his eyes shut again, and took a deep breath before pushing in with the tips of his fore- and ring-finger. There was some brief resistance before they popped in with a wet sound and he let out a loud gasp.

Pidge’s eyes widened admiringly. “Two fingers already? You must already have a lot of practice with this.”

“Shut up,” Keith groaned, pushing his digits in all the way to the knuckles. His agitated demeanor faltered as he pulled back out and thrust in again, long and slow. His spine arched just slightly and he gave a brief hum of arousal.

He was soon adding another finger and Pidge aided him by taking charge of the lube bottle, squeezing a stream of thick liquid down the underside of his balls, making him shiver. He stretched himself wide, thrusting in with more force. His cock, the head now a deep red and purple, bobbed up and down, smacking softly against his stomach. He lay there on Pidge’s sheets, hips bucking and toes curling in the blanket, his head turned to the side with his eyes clenched shut so tight that wrinkles formed around the corners of his eyes. The musky scent of his sweat and pleasure drifted up to Pidge’s nose, equally pungent and alluring.  This felt … right. Him, writhing on her bed, fucking himself on his own calloused fingers. It felt like the logical conclusion to all the song and dance of the past few weeks.

He caught her off-guard when he sat back up, taking the dildo and the tube from her. He squeezed more lubricant onto the purple shaft, letting it sluice down the wavy ridges, before fisting the dildo with firm strokes until the whole device was covered in an even coat. When he had finished, she took the dildo back from him, ignoring his confused glance, and positioned the dildo between her own legs so that it stood straight up. She gave him a wordless stare.

“I can’t,” he panted out in a small, breathless voice.

She furrowed her brows at him. “Just take it slow.”

After a few moments of reluctant hesitance—time wasted, Pidge felt, while Keith’s ass was dripping and ready to go—he gingerly climbed over her hips. She guided his waist with her free hand, helping him position himself over the dildo. He took in a deep, quivering breath to steady himself again and lowered himself onto the head. With her hand on the base, she could feel the hard press, the firm resistance, and then the pop as the head slipped in and he gritted his teeth. She pulled down on his waist and felt him sink rapidly, heard him release a startled cry, and he kept sinking until Pidge could feel the heat of his balls and perineum on her hand.

“ _Fuck_ ,” He cursed, curling in on himself, chin nearly touching his chest. His stomach shuddered with every intake of air and she felt warmth in her own briefs at the sight of him spreading his legs further, trying to take the dildo more easily.

“Move,” she commanded him, and this time, there was no room for patience. He lifted his hips, pulling off the purple cock, leaving a shiny wet trail on the thick shaft. Slowly, so _slow_ , he started to fuck himself on the dildo she made for him.

The air around them was dead silent except for the harsh puffs of Keith’s breath, glancing off the walls, the ceiling, Pidge’s ears—he gradually increased the pace of his thrusts, rolling downward in deep, long strokes that had him wincing on the up-draw. A few wanton moans made it past the seal of his lips, and then more, and louder as he sped up. Lube leaked out of his entrance and over Pidge’s fingers as she held the base of the dildo firm for him. She could feel his thighs smacking dully against hers and his weight always hovering deliciously close to her groin. He rode her like the soldier he was—stubborn, unceasing, with a body completely wounded by pleasure and a vulnerable, pleading note to his boyish voice. His cock dripped strings of white precome onto her t-shirt.

“Please,” he begged her, and somehow she knew what he wanted. She reached up and wrapped her hand around his neck, squeezing the two arteries on either side to restrict his oxygen. His hips stuttered and his eyes sharpened to two slits, just barely open. He fucked himself hard and fast over her body, letting out wheezing moans.

“Fuck, shit,” he gasped roughly, gravel in his voice, “Fuck—”

She gripped his neck tighter and he arched his back, hips working furiously. He circled his own cock with a tight fist, pushing into the ring with clumsy thrusts. Only a moment later he came all over his hand, shooting onto Pidge’s clothed stomach and chest, choking out a raw cry. Pidge felt something bright building inside of her, pushing out at the edges of her body, filling her with light, and she rode the wave with him. He continued to cry out as he milked himself through the orgasm, still riding the dildo at a rough pace. Pidge kept a tight hold on his windpipe, greedily absorbing the sight of his slack face, his eyes half-rolled up in their sockets. Only when he finally slowed to a halt did she let go. He pulled off of the cock slowly, flinching, until the head popped back out, shining and wet.

“Damn,” Pidge said for what felt like the thousandth time in the space of two days. Keith merely grunted—in agreement, discontentment, or what, she couldn’t tell. He crawled off of her and sagged face-forward onto the bed at her side, looking just as terribly ungraceful and odd-ended as he always did. He gasped out harsh breaths that gradually began to slow.

Pidge grabbed the lube and the dildo and tossed them unceremoniously onto the floor. She half-heartedly pulled her blanket over him before laying back on the pillow, crossing one foot over the other.

Next to her, Keith shifted. One bleary, dark eye peered out at her from the wrinkled bedsheets. “Don’t you … want to …?”

“I’m good,” she answered, and she was. She felt better than she had in … she couldn’t remember when. Like a piece of the natural order clicked back into place.

He was silent for a moment. “When I said I wanted something “no-strings-attached,” I didn’t mean—you don’t have to hold yourself back.”

“I’m not,” she assured him, angling a smile at his prone form. That single eye remained fixed on her, unconvinced. She rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “I mean it. I’m good.”

They both lay there for a while, not quite together, not quite touching, just thinking. Pidge had no idea what time it was. What did it matter, anyway? All the hours they had left were just a black smear of charcoal against the perimeter of the void, the planets, the stars. Even still, it was hard not to feel self-important. They’d achieved something. Not what they set out to achieve, but still something.

“Do you remember,” Pidge started, then paused uncertainly. “Do you remember that one time, back in the Garrison, when we shot paint all over the chief patrol officer’s car? ‘Cause he was talking shit about Kerberos, and dad, and Matt, and Shiro? That guy was so mad. He always thought it was your fault, but he had no way to prove it. Never suspected me once.”

She received no response. For a moment, she wondered if he’d gone to sleep. But then he piped up, “This … this _is_ no-strings-attached, right?”

Pidge just laughed.


End file.
